■  ANCIENT  INDIA 


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ANCIENT    INDIA 


LANGUAGE  AND  RELIGIONS 


PROF.   H.  OLDENBERG 


CHICAGO 

THE    OPEN    COURT    PUBLISHING    COMPANY 

iLONDON:  17  JOHNSON'S  COURT,  FLEET  ST.,  E.  C.) 
1896 


Translations  of  the  articles  "Religion  of  the  Veda"  and 
"Buddhism"  copyrighted  by  The  Open  Court  Publishing  Com- 
pany, 1896. 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS. 


PAGE 

The  Study  of  Sanskrit i 

The  Religion  of  the  Veda 43 

Buddhism 78 


PUBLISHERS'  NOTE. 


THE  THREE  essays  forming  this  little  volume  originally 
appeared  in  the  Deutsche  Rundschau  of  Berlin  and  are 
now  published  in  English  by  virtue  of  a  special  arrangement 
with  their  distinguished  author.  The  first  was  translated  by  Prof. 
A.  H.  Gunlogsen  of  Tacoma,  Washington,  and  the  second  and 
third  by  Dr.  Otto  W.  Weyer  of  Elmira,  N.  Y. 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSKRIT. 


THE  study  of  Sanskrit,  the  science  of  the  antiqui- 
ties of  India,  is  about  a  century  old.  It  was  in 
the  year  1784  that  a  number  of  men  acting  in  Calcutta 
as  judges  or  administrative  officers  of  the  East  India 
Company,  formed  themselves  into  a  scientific  society, 
the  Asiatic  Society.  We  may  say  that  the  founding 
of  the  Asiatic  Society  was  contemporaneous  with  the 
rise  of  a  new  branch  of  historical  inquiry,  the  possi- 
bility of  which  preceding  generations  had  barely  or 
never  thought  of. 

Englishmen  began  the  work  ;  soon  it  was  taken  up 
by  other  nations ;  and  in  the  course  of  time,  in  a 
much  greater  degree  than  is  the  case  with  the  study 
of  hieroglyphic  and  cuneiform  inscriptions,  it  has  be- 
come ever  more  distinctly  a  branch  of  inquiry  pecu- 
liarly German. 

The  little  band  of  workers  who  are  busy  in  the 
workshops  of  this  department  of  science,  have  not 
been  accustomed  to  have  the  eyes  of  other  men  turned 
upon  their  doings — their  successes  and  failures.  But, 
in  spite,  nay,  rather  in  consequence  of  this,  it  is  right 
that  an  attempt  should  be  made  to  invite  even  the 
most  disinterested  to  an  inspection  of  these  places  of 
industry,  and  to  point  out,  piece  by  piece,  the  work, 
or  at  least  part  of  the  work,  that  has  been  done 
there. 


2  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

There  still  lies  formless  in  the  workshops  of  this 
department  of  inquiry  many  a  block  of  unhewn  stone, 
which  perhaps  will  forever  resist  the  shaping  hand. 
But  still,  under  the  active  chisel,  many  a  form  has  be- 
come visible,  from  whose  features  distant  times  and 
the  past  life  of  a  strange  people  look  down  upon  us — 
a  people  who  are  related  to  us,  yet  whose  ways  are  so 
far  removed  in  every  respect  from  our  ways. 

We  shall  first  cast  a  gfance  at  the  beginning  of  In- 
dian research  toward  the  close  of  the  last  century. 
We  shall  trace  the  way  in  which  the  new  science,  after 
the  first  hasty  survey  of  its  territory,  at  once  concen- 
trated its  efforts  to  a  more  profound  investigation  of 
its  subject  and  advanced  to  an  incomparably  broader 
plane  of  study.  We  shall,  above  all,  follow  the  diffi- 
cult course  pursued  in  the  study  of  the  Veda,  the  most 
important  of  the  literary  remains  of  ancient  India,  a 
production  with  which  even  the  works  of  the  oldest 
Buddhism  are  not  to  be  compared  in  point  of  histor- 
ical importance.  Of  the  problems  that  this  science 
encountered,  its  aspirations,  and  of  the  successes  that 
attended  its  efforts  in  solving  difficult  questions,  we 
may  venture  to  give  a  description,  or  at  least  an 
outline. 

T. 

The  first  effective  impulse  to  the  study  of  Sanskrit 
and  Sanskrit  literature  was  given  by  Sir  William  Jones, 
who,  in  1783,  embarked  for  India  to  assume  the  post 
of  Judge  of  the  Supreme  Court  of  Judicature  at  Fort 
William.  The  honor  of  having  inaugurated  a  new 
era  of  philological  inquiry,  was  heightened  by  the  lus- 
tre and  charm  of  personal  character  which  this  gifted 
and  versatile  man  exerted  upon  his  contempora- 
ries.    In  prose  and  in  verse  Jones  is  extolled  by  his 


The  study  of  Sanskrit.  3 

friends  of  both  sexes  as  the  phoenix  of  his  time,  "  the 
most  enlij^fhtened  of  the  sons  of  men" — encomiums 
many  of  which  a  calmer  and  more  distant  observer 
would  be  inclined  to  modify.  The  correspondence 
and  other  memoranda  of  Jones,  which  exist  in  great 
abundance,*  furnish  the  reader  of  to-day  rather  the 
picture  of  an  indefatigable  and  euphuistic  dilettante, 
than  that  of  an  earnest  investigator, — apart  from  the 
fact  that  he  was  alike  greatly  deficient  in  discernment 
and  zeal. 

As  a  young  man  we  find  Jones  engaged  in  reading 
and  reproducing  in  English  verse,  the  works  of  Per- 
sian and  Arabian  poets;  occasionally  also  with  glimpses 
into  Chinese  literature.  Then,  again,  a  project  of  his 
own,  an  heroic  epic — a  sort  of  new  .^neid,  for  which, 
and  certainly  with  ingenuity  enough,  the  Phoenician 
mythological  deities  were  impressed  into  service — 
was  to  celebrate  the  perfections  of  the  English  con- 
stitution. On  the  journey  to  India  this  man  of  thirty- 
seven  sketched  a  catalogue  of  the  works,  which,  God 
granting  him  life,  he  hoped  to  write  after  celebrated 
models.  These  models  were  carefully  designated  op- 
posite the  separate  projects  of  the  outline.  By  the 
side  of  this  heroic  epic  (after  the  pattern  of  Homer), 
we  find  a  history  of  the  war  with  America  (after  the 
patterns  of  Thucydides  and  Polybius),  a  philosophical 
and  historical  dialogue  (after  the  pattern  of  Plato), 
and  other  plans  of  similar  works. 

With  this  feeling  of  omnipotent  self-assurance, 
wholly  untroubled  with  doubts,  Jones  was  placed  in 
India  before  the  task  of  opening  a  way  into  the  gigan- 


♦  Edited  by  his  biographer,  Lord  Teignmouth,  and  often  given  with  more 
completeness  than  appears  advisable  considering  the  paneg^ical  charac- 
ter of  the  biography. 


4  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

tic  masses  of  an  unknown  literature,  of  a  strange  and 
beautiful  poetry.  He  was  as  well  qualified  for  the  pur- 
pose (perhaps  in  a  higher  degree  so)  as  many  a  more 
earnest  and  gifted  scholar  might  have  been. 

The  situation  of  affairs  which  he  found  in  India 
forced  it  upon  the  European  rulers  of  the  land  as  a 
duty,  to  acquaint  themselves  with  the  Sanskrit  lan- 
guage and  its  literature.  The  rapid  extension  and  at 
the  same  time  the  redoubled  activity  of  the  English 
rule  made  it  inconceivable  that  the  existence  of  the 
old  indigenous  civilization  and  literature  of  the  na- 
tion could  long  remain  ignored  or  merely  superfici- 
ally recognized. 

Preeminently  did  this  necessity  assert  itself  in  the 
administration  of  justice,  where  the  policy  of  the  East 
India  Company  imperatively  demanded  that  the  na- 
tives should  be  suffered  to  retain  as  many  of  their 
laws  and  customs  as  it  was  possible  to  concede  them. 
Already,  in  an  act  of  parliament  passed  in  1772  in  re- 
gard to  the  affairs  of  the  company,  a  measure  had 
been  incorporated,  at  the  suggestion  of  Warren  Hast- 
ings, providing  that  Mohammedan  and  Indian  lawyers 
should  take  part  in  court  proceedings,  in  order  to  give 
effect  to  native  laws  and  assist  in  the  formulation  of 
judgments.  The  dependence  that  thus  resulted,  of 
European  judges  upon  the  reliability  or  unreliability 
of  Indian  pandits,  must  have  been  trying  indeed,  to  the 
conscientious  jurist;  for  the  assertions  of  Indian  coun- 
cillors as  to  the  principles  of  the  Law  of  inheritance, 
contract,  etc.,  contained  in  the  native  books,  were  sub- 
ject to  no  control. 

Warren  Hastings,  In  order  to  obviate  the  difficulty, 
had  a  digest  made  by  several  Brahmanical  juris- 
consults from  the  old  Sanskrit  law  books,  and  this  was 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSKRIT.  5 

translated  into  English.  The  undertaking  had  but  little 
success,  principally  because  no  European  was  to  be 
found  who  could  translate  directly  from  the  Sanskrit. 
A  translation  had  first  to  be  made  from  Sanskrit  into 
Persian  and  from  Persian  again  into  English.*  The 
necessity  therefore  of  gaining  direct  access  to  the 
Sanskrit  language  was  unquestionable.  The  under- 
taking was  not  an  easy  one,  though  it  was  still  quite 
different  from  such  apparently  impossible  feats  of 
philological  ingenuity  as  the  deciphering  of  hiero- 
glyphic and  cuneiform  inscriptions. 

The  knowledge  and  likewise  the  use  of  Sanskrit  in 
India  had  lived  on  in  unbroken  tradition.f  There  were 
countless  pandits  who  knew  Sanskrit  as  well  as  the 
scholars  of  the  Middle  Ages  knew  Latin,  and  who 
were  eminently  competent  to  teach  the  language.  It 
was  easy  to  overcome  the  opposing  Brahmanical  pre- 
judices. To  become  master,  however,  of  the  obstacles 
which  emanated  from  the  indescribably  intricate  and 
perverted  grammatical  system|  of  the  Hindus,  offered 
greater  difficulties,  which  could  only  be  overcome  by 
patience  and  enthusiasm. 

Just  at  the  first  moments  of  this  trouble  came  the 
arrival  of  Sir  William  Jones  in  India.  Immediately 
he  was  the  central  figure.  From  him  came  the  found- 
ing of  the  Asiatic  Society;  from  him,  the  impulse  to  a 
new  revision  of  the  Hindu  law  of  contract  and  inheri- 


*  Published  in  1776,  under  the  title,  "A  Code  of  Gentoo  Law." 
+  This  is  the  case  at  the  present  time.    Compare,  upon  this  point,  Max 
MQller's  "  India  what  can  it  teach  us  "  p.  78  et  seq. 

JThe  original  complaint  of  Paulinus  a  S.  Bartholomaeo,  a  missionary  in 
India  about  the  time  of  Jones,  is  well  known. — "The  devil,  with  a  phenomenal 
display  of  ingenuity  and  craft,  had  incited  the  Brahmanical  sages  to  invent  a 
language  so  rich  and  so  complex,  that  its  mysteries  might  be  concealed  not 
only  from  the  people  at  large,  but  even  from  the  very  scholars  who  were 
conversant  with  it." 


6  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

tance,  this  time  undertaken  on  a  surer  basis.  He  as- 
sembled about  him  competent  Brahmans  versed  in 
Sanskrit.  In  the  year  1790  he  wrote:  "Every  day  I 
talk  Sanskrit  with  the  pandits;  I  hope  before  I  leave 
India  to  understand  it  as  I  understand  Latin." 

It  was  not  now  a  question  of  research,  but  of  ac- 
quisition, of  study;  that  clear  and  satisfactory  results 
might  rapidly  be  acquired,  and  that  a  proper  selection 
of  noteworthy  productions  of  the  Hindu  mind  might 
be  made  and  presented  before  the  eyes  of  all.  Jones 
translated  the  most  delightful  of  all  Hindu  dramas, 
the  story  of  the  touching  fate  of  the  ascetic  maiden, 
Sakuntala,  who  in  the  sylvan  quiet  of  her  retreat  was 
seen  and  loved  by  the  kingly  hunter  Dushjanta — a 
work,  full  of  the  most  delicate  sentiment,  exhaling 
fragrance  like  the  summer  splendor  of  Indian  Nature, 
and  sung  in  the  delicate  rhythms  of  Kalidasa,  of  in- 
spired eloquence.* 

Still  more  important  than  the  version  of  Sakuntala 
was  the  publication  of  a  second  great  work,  which 
Jones  translated,  the  Laws  of  Manu.  It  seemed  as 
though  a  Lycurgus  of  a  primitive  oriental  era  had 
come  to  light;  for  this  wonderful  picture  of  a  strange 
people's  life  was  ascribed  to  the  remotest  antiquity — a 
description  of  Brahmanical  rule  by  the  grace  of  Brah- 
ma, magnified  and  distorted  by  priestly  pride,  in  which 
the  people  are  nothing,  the  prince  is  little,  the  priest  is 
everything.  In  the  face  of  such  an  abruptly  accumu- 
lated mass  of  unexpected  revelations,  respecting  an  an- 

*It  was  formerly  thought,  for  reasons  that  have  not  withstood  the  assault 
of  criticism,  that  Kalidasa  flourished  in  the  first  century  before  Christ;  it  was 
the  custom  to  compare  him  to  the  Roman  poets  of  the  Augustan  era,  whose 
contemporaries  he  in  that  event  would  about  have  been.  In  point  of  fact  he 
must  be  assigned  to  an  era  several  centuries  later, — about  the  sixth  century 
after  Christ. 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSKRIT.  -j 

cient  civilization  hitherto  removed  from  all  knowledge, 
how  could  one  resist  an  attempt  to  give  to  that  civili- 
zation and  its  language  a  place  among  known  civili- 
zations and  languages?  Wherever  the  eye  turned 
weighty  and  pregnant  suggestions  offered  themselves, 
and  with  them  the  temptation  to  let  fancy  stray  in 
aimless  sallies.  What  is  more,  Jones  was  in  no  wise 
the  man  to  resist  such  a  temptation.  The  vocabulary 
and  the  grammatical  structure  of  Sanskrit  convinced 
him  that  the  ancient  language  of  the  Hindus  was  re- 
lated to  those  of  the  Greeks,  Romans,  and  Germans, 
that  it  must  have  been  derived  with  them  from  a  com- 
mon mother  tongue.*  But  side  by  side  with  the  con- 
ception of  this  incomparably  suggestive  idea,  innumer- 
able fanciful  theories  abound  in  the  works  of  Jones, 
concerning  the  relationship  of  the  primitive  peoples, 
where  everything  was  found  to  be  in  some  way  related 
to  everything  else.  Now  the  Hindu  tongue  was  iden- 
tified with  that  of  the  Old  Testament;  now  Hindu  civ- 
ilization was  brought  into  connection  with  South 
American  civilization.  Buddha  was  said  to  be  Woden; 
and  the  pyramids  and  sphinxes  of  Egypt  were  claimed 
to  show  the  style  of  the  same  workmen  who  built  the 
Hindu  cave-temples  and  chiseled  the  ancient  images 
of  Buddha. 

Fortunately  for  the  new  study  of  Sanskrit,  the  con- 
tinuation of  the  work  begun  b}'  Jones  fell  to  one  of  the 
most  cautious  and  comprehensive  observers  of  facts 
that  have   ever  devoted  their  attention  and  talent  to 


*The  identity  of  Hindu  words  with  those  of  Latin,  Greek,  and  other  lan- 
guages had  been  noticed  by  several  before  Jones,  and  likewise  the  correct  ex- 
planation of  this  phenomenon,  namely  the  kinship  of  the  Hindu  nation  with 
the  Latins  and  Greeks,  had  been  declared  by  Father  Pons  as  early  as  1740. 
For  fuller  account,  see  Benfey,  "History  of  the  Science  of  Language,"  {Ge- 
tchichte  der  Sprachwissenscha/t)  pp.  222,  333-341. 


8  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

the  study  of  oriental  literatures.  This  was  Henry 
Thomas  Colebrooke  (born  1765;  went  to  India  1782), 
the  most  active  in  the  active  band  of  Indian  adminis- 
trative officers.  He  officiated  now  as  an  officer  of  the 
government,  now  again  as  a  justice,  then  as  diplo- 
matist— a  man  well  versed  in  Indian  agriculture  and 
Indian  trade.  One  can  scarcely  regard  without  as- 
tonishment the  multitude  of  disclosures  which,  during 
the  long  period  he  devoted  to  Sanskrit,  he  was  able 
to  make  from  his  incomparable  collection  of  manu- 
scripts. These  to-day  are  among  the  principle  treas- 
ures of  the  India  Office  Library.  From  the  province 
of  Indian  poetry,  Colebrooke,  who  well  knew  the  lim- 
its of  his  own  power,  kept  aloof.  But  in  the  literature 
of  law,  grammar,  philosophy,  and  astronomy,  he  had 
a  wide  reading,  which  in  scope  may  never  again  be 
reached.  He  it  was  who  made  the  first  comprehen- 
sive disclosure  in  regard  to  the  literature  of  the  Veda. 

Colebrooke's  investigations  are  poor  in  hypotheses; 
we  may  say  he  withheld  too  much  from  seeking  to  com- 
prehend the  historical  genesis  of  the  subjects  with 
which  he  dealt.  But  he  established  the  actual  foun- 
dation of  broad  provinces  of  Hindu  research ;  filled 
with  wonder  himself  at  the  ever  widening  vistas  of 
that  literature  which  were  now  revealed  to  him,  and 
awakening  our  just  wonder  by  the  sure  and  patient 
toil  with  which  he  sought  to  penetrate  into  those  dis- 
tant parts. 

While  Colebrooke  was  at  the  height  of  his  activity, 
interest  in  Hindu  inquiry  began  to  be  awakened  in 
a  country  which  has  done  more  than  any  other  land 
to  make  of  Hindu  research  a  firm  and  well-established 
science — in  Germany. 

For  the  discoveries  of  Jones  and  Colebrooke  there 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSKRIT.  9 

could  have  been  no  more  receptive  soil  than  the  Ger- 
many of  that  time,  full  of  spirited  interest  in  the  old 
national  poetry  of  all  nations  and  occupied  with  the 
stirring  movements  rife  in  its  own  philosophy  and  lit- 
erature. Apparently,  indeed,  the  latter  were  closely  al- 
lied to  the  spirit  of  the  distant  Hindu  literature;  for 
here  too  oriental  romanticism  and  poetical  thought 
sought  no  less  boldly  than  the  absolute  philosophy  of 
Germany,  to  penetrate  to  the  primal  and  formless 
source  of  all  forms.  From  the  beginning,  poets  stood 
in  the  foremost  ranks  among  the  Sanskritists  of  Ger- 
many ;  there  were  the  two  Schlegels  and  Friedrich 
Ruckert,  and  beside  these,  careful  and  unassuming, 
the  great  founder  of  grammatical  science,  Franz  Bopp. 
In  the  year  1808  appeared  Friedrich  Schlegel's 
work,  Ueber  die  Sprache  und  Weisheit  der  Inder  (The 
Language  and  Learning  of  the  Hindus).  From  what 
was  known  to  him  of  Hindu  poetry  and  speculation, 
and  according  to  his  own  ideas  of  the  laws  and  aims 
of  the  human  mind,  Schlegel,  with  warm  and  fanciful 
eloquence,  drew  a  picture  of  India  as  a  land  of  exalted 
primitive  wisdom.  Hindu  religion  and  Hindu  poetry 
he  described  as  replete  with  exuberant  power  and 
light,  in  comparison  with  which  even  the  noblest  phi- 
losophy and  poetry  of  Greece  was  but  a  feeble  spark 
The  time  from  which  the  masterpieces  of  the  Hindus 
dated,  appeared  to  him  a  distant,  gigantic,  primeval 
age  of  spiritual  culture.  There  was  the  home  of  those 
earnest  teachings,  full  of  gloomy  tragedy,  of  the  soul's 
migration,  and  of  the  dark  fate  which  ordains  for  all 
beings  their  ways  and  their  end: 

Obedient  to  this  purpose  set,  they  wander;  from  God  to  plants; 

Here,  in  the  abhorred  world  of  existence,  that  ever  moves  to  destruction. 

While  Schlegel   gave  to  the  world   this  fanciful 


lo  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

picture  of  Hindu  wisdom,  highly  effective  from  its 
prophetic  perspectives,  but  still  wanting  in  sober 
truth,  Bopp  applied  himself,  more  unassumingly,  but 
with  an  incomparably  deeper  grasp  and  patient 
sagacity,  to  investigating  the  grammatical  structure 
of  Sanskrit;  and,  on  the  recognized  fact  of  the  rela- 
tionship of  this  language  with  the  Persian  and  the 
principal  European  tongues,  to  establishing  the  science 
of  comparative  grammar.  In  the  year  1816  appeared 
his  Conjugationssystem  der  Sanskritsprache  in  Ver- 
gleichung  niit  jenem  der  griechischen,  lateinischen,  per- 
sischen,  und germanischen  Sprache  (Conjugational  Sys- 
tem of  the  Sanskrit  Language  in  Comparison  with  that 
of  the  Greek,  Latin,  Persian,  and  Teutonic  Lan- 
guages). 

This  was  no  longer  merely  an  attempt  to  find  iso- 
lated similarities  in  the  sounds  of  the  words  of  related 
languages,  but  an  attempt  to  trace  back  not  only 
uniformities  but  also  differences  to  their  fixed  laws; 
and  thus  in  the  life  and  growth  of  these  languages,  as 
they  sprang  from  a  common  root  and  evolved  them- 
selves into  a  rich  complexity,  to  discover  more  and 
more  the  traces  of  a  necessity  dominated  by  definite 
principles. 

We  can  here  only  briefly  touch  upon  the  investi- 
gations made  during  the  last  seventy  years,  for  which 
Bopp  laid  the  foundation  by  the  publication  of  his 
work.  Rarely  have  such  astonishing  results  been 
achieved  by  science  as  here.  Elucidative  of  the  early 
history  of  the  languages  of  Homer  and  the  old  Italian 
monuments  before  they  acquired  the  form  in  which 
we  now  find  them  written,  the  most  unexpected  wit- 
nesses were  brought  to  give  testimony;  namely,  the 
languages  of  the  Hindus,   the  Germans,  the  Slavs, 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSKRIT.  ii 

and  the  Celts.  Of  these  related  tongues,  the  one  sheds 
light  upon  the  obscure  features  of  the  others,  just  as 
natural  history  explains  the  stunted  organs  of  some 
animals  by  pointing  out  the  same  organs  in  their  orig- 
inal, perfect  form,  in  other  animals. 

The  picture  of  the  mother  tongue,  whose  filial  de- 
scendants are  the  languages  of  our  linguistic  family, 
was  no~longer  seen  in  merely  vague  or  doubtful  fea- 
tures. The  laws  under  whose  dominion  the  system  of 
sounds  and  forms  in  the  separate  derived  languages 
have  been  developed  from  the  mother  tongue,  are  be- 
ing ascertained  ever  more  fully  and  formulated  ever 
more  sharply. 

From  the  very  beginning  the  essential  instrument, 
yes,  the  very  foundation  of  this  investigation,  was  the 
Sanskrit  language.  In  the  beginning,  faith  in  the 
primitiveness  of  Sanskrit  in  comparison  with  the  rela- 
ted languages  was  too  strong.  During  the  last  few 
years,  however,  this  erroneous  conception  has  been 
fully  rectified;  and  this  in  itself  is  a  decided  step  in 
advance.  We  know  now  that  the  apparently  simpler 
and  clearer  state  of  Sanskrit  in  sounds  and  forms  is  in 
many  respects  less  primitive  than  the  complicated  re- 
lations of  other  languages,  e.  g.,  the  Greek;  and  that 
we  must  often  set  out  from  these  languages  rather 
than  from  the  Sanskrit,  in  order  to  make  possible  the 
explanation  of  Sanskrit  forms.  Thus  Sanskrit  now 
receives  back  the  light  which  it  has  furnished  for  the 
historical  understanding  of  the  European  languages.* 

•  It  may  be  permissible  here  to  illustrate  this  reversion  of  methods  in  a  sin- 
gle point  that  has  become  of  especially  great  importance  to  grammar. 
The  Greek  has  five  short  vowels,  a,  e,  o,  i,  u.  The  Sanskrit  has  i  and  «  corres- 
ponding to  /and  «;  but  to  the  three  sounds,  a,  e,  o  corresponds  in  Sanskrit  only 
a  single  vowel  a.  Thus,  for  example,  the  Greek  apo  (English,  yVow/)  reads  in 
Sanskrit  apa;  the  a  of  the  first  syllable,  and  the  o  of  the  second  syllable  of  the 


12  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

I  must  not  attempt  to  follow  in  detail  the  course 
which  the  science  of  comparative  grammar,  apart 
from  its  connection  with  Hindu  research,  has  taken. 
While  the  two  branches  of  the  study  were  rapidly  ad- 
vanced by  Germans  particularly,  and  likewise  in  France 
by  the  sagacious  Burnouf,  new  material  kept  pouring 
in  from  India  no  less  rapidly.  In  two  countries  on 
the  outskirts  of  Indian  civilization,  in  the  Himalayan 
valleys  of  Nepal,  and  in  Ceylon,  the  sacred  literature 
of  the  Buddhists,  which  had  disappeared  in  India 
proper,  was  brought  to  light  in  two  collections,  one  in 
Sanskrit  and  one  in  the  popular  dialect  Pali.  The  in- 
genuity of  Prinseps  succeeded  in  deciphering  the 
oldest  Indian  written  characters  on  inscriptions  and 
coins.  In  Calcutta  was  undertaken  and  completed  in 
the  Thirties  the  publication  of  the  Mahabharata,  a  gi- 
gantic heroic  poem  of  almost  a   hundred   thousand 

Greek  word  is  thus  represented  in  Sanskrit  by  a.  Or,  to  use  another  example, 
the  Greek  menos  (English,  courage)  is  in  Sanskrit  tnanas:  Greek  epheron  (I 
carried) — abharam.  What  now  is  the  original,  i.  e..  what  existed  in  the  Indo- 
Germanic  mother  tongue  for  the  three  sounds  of  the  Greek  a,  e,  o,  or  the  single 
sound  of  the  Sanskrit  a?  When  scholars  began  to  study  comparative  philology 
upon  the  basis  of  the  Sanskrit  they  thought  the  a — and  this  was  a  conclusion 
apparently  supported  by  the  simplicity  of  the  language — to  be  alone  the  orig- 
inal sound;  and  were  led  to  believe  that  this  vowel  was  later  divided  on  Euro- 
pean soil  into  three  sounds,  a,  e,  o.  Investigations  of  the  most  recent  time — 
and  for  these  we  are  to  thank  Amelung,  Burgman,  John  Schmidt,  and  others — 
have  shown  that  the  development  of  the  vowel  system  took  the  opposite  course. 
The  vowels  «,  ?,  o  were  already  in  the  Indo  Germanic  mother  tongue;  and  in 
Sanskrit,  or  more  accurately,  before  the  time  of  Sanskrit,  in  the  language  which 
the  ancestors  of  the  Indians  and  Persians  spoke  when  both  formed  one  people, 
these  vowels  were  merged  into  a  single  vowel  Thus  the  e  of  esti  and  the  o  of 
apo  are  more  original  than  the  a  of  asti,  apa. 

Now,  we  find  in  Sanskrit  that  where  the  Greek  e  corresponds  to  the  San- 
skrit a,  certain  consonants  preceding  this  vowel,  as.  e.g.,  k,  are  affected  in  a 
different  way  by  the  latter,  than  in  instances  where  for  the  a  of  Sanskrit  the 
Greek  a  or  0  is  used.  From  the  linguistic  form  of  Sanskrit  alone,  which  in  the 
one  case  as  in  the  other  has  a,  it  would  not  be  intelligible  why  the  k  should 
each  time  meet  a  different  fate.  The  Greek,  in  that  it  has  preserved  the  orig- 
inal differences  of  the  vowels,  gives  the  key  to  an  understanding  of  the  peculiar 
transformations  which  have  taken  place  in  the  A-sound  in  large  and  importan' 
groups  of  Sanskrit  words. 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSKRIT.  13 

couplets,  in  whose  vast  cantos  with  their  labyrinth  of 
episodes  and  sub-episodes  many  generations  of  poets 
have  brought  together  legends  of  the  heroes  and  days 
of  the  olden  time,  of  their  struggles  and  flagellations. 

The  sum  and  substance  of  all  this  newly-acquired 
knowledge  has  been  incorporated  in  the  great  work  of 
a  Norwegian,  who  became,  in  Germany,  a  German — in 
the  Indische  Alterthumskunde  (Hindu  Antiquities)  of 
Christian  Lassen. 

Lassen  did  not  belong  to  the  great  pioneers  of 
science,  like  Bopp.  It  must  also  be  said  that  often 
that  sagacity  of  philological  thought  is  wanting  in  him, 
which  sheds  light  on  questions  even  where  it  affords 
no  definite  solution  of  them.  And,  indeed,  was  it  not 
a  herculean  undertaking,  a  work  like  that  of  the  Dana- 
ides,  to  explore  the  older  periods  of  the  Hindu  past 
when,  as  the  chief  sources  of  information,  one  was 
solely  limited  to  the  great  epic,  and  the  law  book  oi 
Manu?  Even  a  surer  critical  power  than  Lassen  pos- 
sessed could  not  have  discovered  much  of  history  in 
the  nebulous  confusion  of  legends,  in  the  invented  se- 
ries of  kings  in  Mahabharata,  and  in  that  colorless  uni- 
formity which  the  style  of  the  Hindu  Virgils  spreads 
unchangeably  over  the  enormous  periods  of  time  of 
which  they  assume  to  inform  us.  In  spite  of  this,  Las- 
sen's Antiquities — the  work  of  tireless  diligence  and 
rare  learning — stands  as  a  landmark  in  the  history 
of  Hindu  investigations,  uniting  all  the  results  of  past 
time,  and  pointing  out  anew,  by  the  very  things  in 
which  it  is  lacking,  still  untried  undertakings. 

Just  at  this  time,  however,  when  the  first  volume 
of  Lassen's  work,  treating  of  the  earliest  periods,  ap- 
peared, came  the  beginning  of  a  movement  which  has 
severed  the  development  of  Hindu  studies  into  two 


M 


ANCIENT  INDIA. 


parts.  New  personalities  appeared  upon  the  scene 
and  pushed  to  the  front  a  new  series  of  problems,  for 
the  solution  of  which  an  apparently  inexhaustible,  and 
to  this  day,  in  a  certain  sense,  a  still  inexhaustible 
supply  of  freshly  acquired  material  was  offered.  This 
was  the  most  important  acquisition  that  has  ever  been 
added  to  our  knowledge  of  the  world's  literature 
through  any  one  branch  of  oriental  inquiry — the  ac- 
quisition of  the  Veda  for  science. 


Considering  the  circumstances,  this  acquisition 
of  the  Veda  for  science  can  hardly  be  accounted  a 
discovery.  The  existence  and  position  in  Hindu  lit- 
erature of  this  great  work,  had  long  been  known.  At 
every  step  the  writings  that  had  previously  been 
brought  to  light,  pointed  to  the  Veda  as  the  source  from 
which  all  proceeded — even  more  strikingly  than  in  the 
literature  of  Greece,  we  are  led  back,  at  every  turn,  to 
the  poems  of  Homer.  Manuscripts  of  the  Vedic  texts, 
moreover,  were  to  be  found,  not  only  in  India;  they 
had  long  been  possessed  in  great  numbers  by  the 
libraries  of  Europe.  But  an  attempt  had  scarcely,  if 
at  all,  been  made  to  lay  hold  of  these  and  see  if  in  the 
unmeasurable  chaos  of  this  mass  of  writings  a  firm 
ground  for  science  could  not  be  acquired. 

The  Sanskrit  of  the  great  epic  poems,  or  of  Kalidasa, 
was  understood  well  enough ;  but  of  the  dialect  in 
which  the  most  important  parts  of  the  Veda  were 
written,  no  more  was  known  than  one  familiar  with 
the  French  of  to-day  would  know  of  the  language  of 
the  Troubadours.  Without  going  deeply  into  the  study 
it  was  easy  to  discern  its  inherent  difficulties  from  the 
unwonted  singularity  of  the  text  and  its  strange  con- 


THE  STUD  V  OF  SANSKRIT.  15 

tents,  which,  in  part  at  least,  were  extremely  compli- 
cated, and  often  involved  in  a  maze  of  minor  details. 
Would  an  earnest  explorer  of  this  territory,  even  in 
case  he  succeeded,  be  rewarded  for  his  pains? 

It  was  a  band  of  young  German  scholars  who  bent 
their  energies  to  this  work.  Most  of  them  are,  or 
were  till  very  lately,  among  us — Max  Miiller,  Roth, 
and  Weber.  Two  others,  whose  names  shduld  not  be 
omitted  here,  Adalbert  Kuhn  and  Benfey,  died  some 
years  ago.  There  was  no  need  of  undertaking  great 
expeditions,  such  as  were  those  that  set  out  for  the 
investigation  of  Egyptian  and  Babylonian  antiquity. 
Those  monuments  in  whose  colossal  and  strange  forms 
fragments  of  a  primeval  age  meet  the  eye,  were  want- 
ing in  India.  The  knowledge  which  was  to  be  ac- 
quired was  not  contained  in  inscriptions,  but  in  man- 
uscripts.* Our  scholars  repaired  to  London  for  a 
greater  or  less  length  of  time,  and  the  work  was  begun 
among  the  store  of  manuscripts  possessed  by  the  East 
India  House. 

There  was  no  lack  of  confidence.  "  It  would  be  a 
disgrace,"  wrote  Roth,  ''to  the  criticism  and  the  in- 
genuity of  our  century  which  has  deciphered  the 
stone  inscriptions  of  the  Persian  kings  and  the  books 
of  Zoroaster,  if  it  did  not  succeed  in  reading  in  this 
enormous  literature  the  intellectual  history  of  the 
Hindu  nation." 

Much  that  Roth  expected  has  been  accomplished 
or  is  on  the  way  towards  accomplishment.  Of  much 
that  was  hoped  for  at  that  time,  we  can  now  say  that 
it  was  unattainable,  and  understand  why.     What  has 

♦The  royal  library  at  Berlin  also  acquired  and  owns  a  rich  coriection  of 
Sanskrit  manuscripts,  for  which  a  foundation  was  laid  by  the  purchase,  at 
the  command  of  Frederick  William  IV.,  of  the  Chambers'manuscr?pts. 


i6  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

been  attained,  however,  has  given  to  the  picture,  which 
science  formed  of  Hindu  antiquity,  an  entirely  different 
aspect.  Unbounded  in  extent,  this  picture  formerly 
seemed  to  lose  itself  in  the  nebulous  depths  of  an  im- 
measurable past.  Now,  determinate  limits  have  been 
found,  and  the  remotest  initial  point  has  been  discov- 
ered for  verifiable  history.  Authentic  sources  were 
disclosed,  leading  to  the  earliest  age  of  Hindu  civiliza- 
tion, from  which,  and  regarding  which,  historical 
testimony  in  the  usual  sense  of  the  word  became  ac- 
cessible ;  and  instead  of  the  twilight,  peopled  with 
uncertain,  shadowy  giants,  in  which  the  epic  poems 
made  those  times  appear,  the  Veda  opened  to  us  a 
reality  which  we  may  hope  to  understand.  Or,  if  in 
many  instances,  instead  of  the  hoped  for  forms,  it  has 
afforded  the  eye  but  an  empty  space,  even  this  was  a 
step  in  advance.  For  then  it  was  at  least  shown  that 
the  knowledge  which  was  sought  was  not  to  be  had  ; 
and  that  which  had  been  given  as  such,  had  disclosed 
itself  as  an  imaginative  picture  born  of  the  caprice  of 
a  later  legend-maker. 

The  literature  of  epic  poetry,  apparently,  could  no 
longer  lay  claim  to  an  incalculable  antiquity  ;  it  sank 
back  into  a  sort  of  Middle  Ages,  behind  which  the  newly 
discovered,  real  antiquity  loomed  forth,  studding  the 
horizon  of  historical  knowledge  with  significant  forms. 
We  shall  now  see  how  the  task  of  understanding  the 
Veda  was  accomplished,  and  shall  describe  at  the  same 
time  what  it  was  that  had  thus  been  acquired.  We 
have  here  a  newly  disclosed  literature  of  venerable  an- 
tiquity, rich  in  marks  of  earnest  effort,  logically  cfevel- 
oped  in  sharply,  nay  rigidly,  characterized  forms  ;  we 
have  a  newly  discovered  piece  of  history,  forming  the 
historical — or  shall  we  say  unhistorical  ? — beginnings 


THE  STUD  Y  OF  SANSKRIT.  17 

of  a  people  related  to  us  by  race,  who  at  an  early  day 
set  out  in  paths  distinctly  removed  from  the  ways  of 
all  other  peoples,  and  created  their  own  strange  forms 
of  existence,  bearing  in  them  the  germs  of  the  mis- 
fortunes they  have  suffered. 

By  what  means  did  we  succeed  in  understanding 
the  Veda? 

Almost  all  the  more  important  parts  of  the  Vedic 
literature — for  the  Veda,  like  the  Bible,  is  not  a  sep- 
arate text,  but  a  literature  with  wide  ramifications — 
are  preserved  in  numerous,  and,  for  the  most  part, 
relatively  modern  manuscripts.  Only  rarely  are  they 
older  than  a  few  centuries;  since  in  the  destructive 
climate  of  India  it  could  not  be  otherwise.  The  texts, 
however,  of  these  later  manuscripts  descend  from  re- 
mote antiquity. 

Before  they  came  to  be  written  in  the  present 
manuscripts,  or  written  in  manuscript  -  form  at  all, 
they  encountered,  in  the  course  of  great  periods  of 
time,  many  and  manifold  misfortunes.  It  is  the  task 
of  the  philological  inquirer  to  ascertain  the  character 
of  these  events — to  determine  the  genetic  history  of 
the  texts.  It  may  be  said  that  these  texts  in  the 
shape  they  have  been  transmitted  to  us,  resemble 
paintings  by  old  masters,  which  bear  unmistakable 
traces  of  alternate  injuries  and  attempted  restorations 
by  competent  and  incompetent  hands.  What  we 
want  to  know,  so  far  as  it  lies  in  our  power,  is  the 
form  and  general  character  in  which  they  originally 
existed. 

The  period  to  which  the  origin  of  the  old  Vedic 
poems  belongs,  we  cannot  assign  in  years,  nor  yet  in 
centuries.  But  we  know  that  these  poems  existed, 
when  there  was  not  a  city  in  India,  but  only  hamlets 


i8  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

and  castles;  when  the  names  of  the  powerful  tribes 
which  at  a  later  time  assumed  the  first  rank  among 
the  nations  of  India  were  not  even  mentioned,  no  more 
so  than  in  the  Germany  which  Tacitus  described  were 
mentioned  the  names  of  Franks  and  Bavarians.  It 
was  the  period  of  migrations,  of  endless,  turbulent 
feuds  among  small  unsettled  tribes  with  their  nobles 
and  priests;  people  fought  for  pastures,  and  cows,  and 
arable  land.  It  was  the  period  of  conflict  between  the 
fair-skinned  immigrants,  who  called  themselves  Arya, 
and  the  natives,  the  "dark  people,"  the  "unbelievers 
that  propitate  not  the  Gods." 

As  yet  the  thought  and  belief  of  the  Hindus  did 
not  seek  the  divine  in  those  formless  depths  in  which 
later  ages  conceived  the  idea  of  the  eternal  and  hidden 
Brahma.  Wherever  in  nature  the  brightest  pictures 
met  the  eye  and  the  mightiest  tones  struck  the  ear, 
there  were  their  Gods — the  luminous  arch  of  heaven, 
the  red  hues  of  dawn,  the  thundering  storm-god  and 
his  followers,  the  winds.  The  Vedic  Aryans  had  not 
yet  reached  their  later  abode  on  the  two  powerful  sis- 
ter streams,  the  Ganges  and  the  Yumna;  the  Sindhu 
(Indus)  was  still  for  them  the  "  Mother  Stream,"  of 
which  one  of  the  oldest  poets  of  the  Rig  Veda  says  :  * 

"  From  earth  along  the  reach  of  Heaven  riseth  the  sound ; 
Ceaseless  the  roar  of  her  waters,  the  bright  one. 

As  floods  of  thundering  rain,  poured  from  the  darkened  cloud-bosom, 
So  rushes  the  Sindu,  like  the  steer,  the  bellowing  one." 

The  poetry  of  the  Rig  Veda  dates  from  the  time  of 
those  wanderings  and  struggles  that  took  place  on 
the  Indus  and  its  tributary  streams.  Certain  fam- 
ilies exercised  the  functions  of  priestly  offices,  and 

*  Hundreds  of  Vedic  melodies  have  been  handed  down  to  us  in  a  form  the 
interpretation  of  which  can  be  subject  to  no  real  doubt.  As  it  appears,  they 
are  the  oldest  but  unfortunately  the  poorest  memorials  of  musical  antiquity. 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSR'KIT.  ig 

possessed  the  acquisitions  of  an  artificially  connected 
speech  together  with  a  simple  form  of  chant  using  but 
few  tones.  These  families  created  Vedic  poetry,  and 
transmitted  the  art  to  their  posterity.  The  songs  of 
the  Rig  Veda,  which  are  almost  all  sacrificial  songs,  were 
not  really  what  we  call  popular  poetry.  We  do  not 
hear  in  them  the  language  that  pours  forth  from  the  soul 
of  a  nation,  as  it  communes  in  poetical  rhythm  with 
itself.  It  was  a  poetry  that  wanted  mainly  the  proper 
hearers — the  masses  of  the  people  who  spoke  through 
the  mouth  of  the  poet.  Their  hearers  were  God  Agni, 
God  Indra,  or  Goddess  Dawn  ;  and  the  poet  was  not 
he  whom  the  passionate  impulses  of  his  own  soul  or 
his  own  love  of  song  and  legend  impelled  to  sing,  but 
he  was  mainly  one  who  belonged  to  a  poet-family — 
one  of  the  families  of  men  who  in  the  course  of  time 
became  united  as  a  caste  and  erected  ever  more  insu- 
perable barriers  between  their  sacred  existence  and 
the  profane  reality  of  daily  life.  For  the  gods  such 
a  poet  only  "  could  frame  a  worthy  poem,  as  an  expe- 
rienced, skillful  wheelwright  makes  a  wagon," — a  poem 
which  would  be  rewarded  by  the  rich  princely  lords 
of  the  sacrifice,  with  steeds  and  kine,  with  golden  or- 
naments and  female  slaves  from  the  spoils  of  war. 
"  Thy  blessing,"  says  a  Vedic  poet  to  a  God,* 

"  Rests  with  the  givers, 
With  the  victors,  the  many  valiant  heroes, 
Who  make  gifts  to  us  of  clothing,  kine,  and  horses; 
May  they  rejoice  in  the  splendor  and  plenty  of  divine  bounty. 

Let  all  things  waste  that  they  have  won 

Who,  without  rewarding,  would  profit  by  our  hymns  to  heaven. 

The  godless  ones,  that  boast  their  fortune, 

The  transgressors — cast  them  from  the  light  of  day." 

It  has  been  fatal  for  all  thought  and  poetry  in  In- 
dia, that  a  second  world,  filled  with  strangely  fantastic 

*  Rig  Veda  V.  42,  8-g. 


20  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

shapes,  was  established  at  an  early  day  beside  the 
real  world.  This  was  the  place  of  sacrifice  with  its 
three  sacred  fires  and  the  schools  in  which  the  virtu- 
osos of  the  sacrificial  art  were  educated — a  sphere  of 
strangest  activity  and  the  playground  of  a  subtle, 
empty  mummery,  whose  enervating  power  over  the 
spirit  of  an  entire  nation  we  can  scarcely  comprehend 
in  its  full  extent.  The  poetry  of  the  Rig  Veda  shows 
us  this  process  of  disease  at  an  early  stage ;  but  it  is 
there,  and  much  of  that  which  constitutes  the  essence 
of  the  Rig  Veda,  is  rooted  in  it. 

In  the  foreground  stands  the  sacrifice,  and  through- 
out, only  the  sacrifice.  "  By  sacrifice  the  Gods  made 
sacrifice  ;  these  regulations  were  the  first,"  it  is  said  in 
a  verse  which  is  thrice  repeated  in  the  Rig  Veda.  The 
praise  of  the  God  for  whom  the  sacrificial  offerings 
were  intended,  his  power,  his  victories,  and  the  prayers 
for  possessions  which  were  hoped  for  in  return  for  hu- 
man offerings — the  prosperity  of  flocks  and  posterity, 
long  life,  destruction  of  enemies,  the  hated  and  the 
godless — such  is  the  subject-matter  of  the  multitudi- 
nous repetitions  that  recur  throughout  the  hymns  of 
the  Rig  Veda.  Still,  among  these  verse-making  sacri- 
ficers  there  was  not  an  utter  absence  of  real  poets. 
And  thus  among  the  stereotyped  implorations  and 
songs  of  praise  we  find  here  and  there  a  great  and 
beautiful  picture — the  wonder  of  the  poet's  soul  at  the 
bright  marvels  of  nature  or  the  deep  expression  of  an 
earnest  inner  life.  A  poet  from  the  priestly  family  of 
the  Bharadvajas  sings  of  the  goddess  Ushas,  the 
dawn:* 

♦The  Indian  word  Ushas  is  related  to  the  Greek  Eos,  the  Latin  Aurora. 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSKRIT.  zt 


"  We  see  thee,  thou  lovely  one ;  far,  far,  thou  shinest. 
To  heaven's  heights  thy  brilliant  light-beams  dart. 
In  beauteous  splendor  shimmering,  unveilest  thou  thy  bosom, 
Radiant  with  heaven's  sheen,  celestial  queen  of  dawn  I 

"  The  red  bulls  draw  their  chariot. 
Where  in  thy  splendor  thou  o'erspread'st  the  heavens ; 
Thou  drivest  away  night ;  as  a  hero,  a  bow-man, 
As  a  swift  charioteer  frighteneth  his  enemies. 

"  A  beautiful  path  has  been  made  for  thee  in  the  mountain. 
Thou  unconquerable  one,  thou  risest  from  out  the  waters. 
So  bring  thou  us  treasures  to  revive  us  on 
Our  further  course,  queenly  daughter  of  heaven."* 

Another  poet  sings  of  Parjanya,  the  rain  God:  f 

"  Like  the  driver  who  forward  whips  his  steeds. 
So  he  urges  onward  his  messengers,  the  clouds. 
From  afar  the  thunder-tone  of  the  lion  arises 
When  the  God  makes  rain  pour  from  the  clouds. 

"  Parjanya's  lightnings  dart ,  the  winds  blow ; 
The  floods  pour  from  heaven  ;  up  spring  grass  and  plants. 
To  all  that  lives  and  moves  a  quickening  is  imparted, 
When  the  God  scatters  his  seeds  on  the  earth. 

"  At  his  command  the  earth  bows  deeply  down ; 
At  his  command  hoofed  creatures  come  to  life  ; 
At  his  command  bloom  forth  the  bright  flowers  : 
May  Parjanya  grant  us  strong  defence  1 

"  A  flood  of  rain  hast  thou  sent ;  now  cease; 
Thou  didst  make  penetrable  the  desert  wastes. 
For  us  thou  hast  caused  plants  to  grow  for  food, 
And  the  prayer  of  men  thou  hast  fulfilled." 

But  we  must  turn  from  the  description  of  Vedic 
poetry  to  examine  the  fortune  that  this  production 
encountered  on  its  way  from  distant  antiquity  to  the 
present  time,  from  the  sacrificial  places  on  the  Indus 
to  the  workshops  of  the  English  and  German  philolo- 
gists.    Here  a  conspicious  fact  is  to  be  dwelt  upon, 

*  Rig  Veda  VI.  64.    The  hymn  following  is  V.  83. 

+  This  God  also  reappears  among  the  kindred  peoples  of  Europe,  as  FiOr- 
gynn  in  the  northern  mythology,  and  among  the  Lithuanians  and  Prussians  as 
the  God  Perkunas,  of  whom  an  old  chronicle  says  :  "  Perkunas  was  the  third 
idol;  and  him  the  people  besought  for  storms,  so  that  during  his  time  they  had 
rain  and  fair  weather  and  suffered  not  from  the  thunder  and  the  lightning." 


29  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

which  belongs  to  the  strangest  phenomena  of  Indian 
history,  so  rich  in  strange  events.  The  hymns  of  the 
Rig  Veda,  as  well  as  the  hymns  of  the  other  Vedas, 
have  been  composed,  collected,  and  transmitted  to 
succeeding  ages.  There  has  been  incorporated  in 
them  a  very  large  sacerdotal  prose  literature,  devel- 
oped throughout  the  older  and  later  divisions,  and 
treating  of  the  art  and  symbolism  of  sacrifice.  There 
have  also  arisen  heretical  sects,  like  the  Buddhists, 
who  denied  the  authority  of  the  Veda,  and  instead  of 
its  teachings  reverenced  as  a  sacred  text  the  code  of 
ordinances  proclaimed  by  Buddha.  And  all  this  has 
taken  place  without  the  art  of  writing. 

In  the  Vedic  ages  writing  was  not  known.  At  the 
time  when  Buddhism  arose  it  was  indeed  known — the 
Indians  probably  learned  to  write  from  Semites — but 
it  was  used  only  for  inditing  short  communications  in 
practical  life,  not  for  writing  books.  We  have  very 
sure  and  characteristic  information  as  to  the  role  which 
the  art  of  writing  played,  or  rather  did  not  play,  in  the 
church  life  of  the  Buddhists  at  a  comparatively  late 
age,  say  about  400  B.  C.  The  sacred  text  of  this  sect 
affords  a  picture,  executed  even  in  its  minutest  features, 
of  life  in  the  houses  and  parks  which  the  brethren  in- 
habited. We  can  see  the  Buddhist  monks  pursue  their 
daily  life  from  morning  to  night ;  we  can  see  them  in 
their  wanderings  and  during  their  rest,  in  solitude  and 
in  intercourse  with  other  monks,  or  laymen  ;  we  know 
the  equipment  of  the  places  occupied  by  them,  their 
furniture,  and  the  contents  of  their  store-rooms.  But 
nowhere  do  we  hear  that  they  read  their  sacred  texts 
or  copied  them  ;  nowhere,  that  in  the  dwellings  of  the 
monks  such  things  as  writing  utensils  or  manuscripts 
were  found. 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSKRIT.  23 

The  memory  of  the  spiritual  brethren,  "rich  in 
hearing," — what  we  to-day  call  a  well-read  man  was 
then  called  one  rich  in  hearing, — took  the  place  of  a 
cloister  library ;  and  if  the  knowledge  of  some  indis- 
pensable text, — as,  e.  g.,  the  formula  of  confession 
which  had  to  be  recited  at  the  full  and  new  moon  in 
the  assembly  of  the  brethren, — was  in  danger  of 
being  lost  among  a  body  of  priests,  they  acted  on  the 
dictum  laid  down  in  an  old  Buddhistic  ordinance:  "By 
these  monks  a  monk  shall  immediately  be  sent  to  a 
neighboring  parish.  He  must  be  thus  instructed  :  'Go, 
Brother,  and  when  thou  hast  learned  by  heart  the 
formula  of  confession,  the  complete  one  or  the  abre- 
viated  one,  come  back  to  us.' " 

It  must  be  admitted  that  under  such  circumstances 
all  the  conditions  for  the  existence  of  books,  and  the 
relations  between  books  and  reader — if  it  be  allowed  me 
for  the  sake  of  brevity  to  use  these  expressions — must 
have  been  of  a  very  different  nature  than  in  an  age  of 
writing  or  one  of  printing.  A  book  could  then  exist 
only  on  condition  that  a  body  of  men  existed  among 
whom  it  was  taught  and  learned  and  transmitted  from 
generation  to  generation.  A  book  could  be  known  only 
at  the  price  of  learning  it  by  heart,  or  of  having  some 
one  at  hand  who  had  thus  learned  it.  Texts  of  a  con- 
tent which  only  claimed  a  passing  notice,  could  not  as 
a  rule  exist.  This  was  fatal  for  historical  writing  and 
generally  speaking  for  all  profane  literature.  Above 
all,  the  existing  texts  were  subjected  to  the  disfigure- 
ments that  errors  of  memory,  carelessness,  or  attempts 
at  improvement  on  the  part  of  the  transmitters  must 
have  imported  into  them. 

Under  conditions  such  as  have  been  described 
above,  the  poetry  of  the  Rig  Veda  has  been  handed 


24  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

down  from  generation  to  generation  through  many 
centuries.  Separate  poems  were  brought  into  the  col- 
lection in  the  course  of  oral  compilation  and  trans- 
mission. The  collection  was  re-corrected  on  repeated 
occasions  and  was  brought  to  greater  completeness; 
again  only  by  oral  compilation  and  transmission.  It 
is  conceivable  enough  that  thus  the  original  structure 
yes,  even  the  existence  itself  of  special  hymns  was 
often  injured,  effaced,  or  destroyed.  Remodeling  de- 
stroyed their  form.  The  lines  of  division  between 
hymns  standing  side  by  side  would  often  be  forgotten 
and  numbers  of  them  would  be  merged  into  an  ap- 
parent unity.  Modern,  and  easily  intelligible  terms 
drove  out  the  obsolete  phrases  and  the  ancient  word- 
forms — often  the  most  valuable  remains  for  the  inves- 
tigator, whom  they  help  to  explain  the  history  of  the 
language,  just  as  the  scientist  deduces  from  fossil  re- 
mains the  history  of  organic  life. 

Especially  fatal  was  it  for  the  old  and  true  form  of 
the  Vedic  hymns  that  they  have  been  stretched  upon 
the  Procrustean  bed  of  grammatical  analysis.  Earlier 
and  more  strongly  than  in  any  other  nation  of  antiquity, 
was  interest  and  pleasure  taken  in  India  in  scientifically 
dissecting  language.  Closely  examining  the  separate 
sounds  of  speech  and  their  underlying  modifications, 
they  employed  exceptional  ingenuity  and  discrimi- 
nation in  constructing  a  system  from  which,  when 
it  became  known  in  Europe,  the  science  of  our  cen- 
tury found  ample  reason  to  learn  much  that  was 
marvellous.  The  ingenuity  and  penetration  of  the 
students  of  Vedic  literature  has  been  burdened  like 
a  curse  with  that  genuinely  Hindu  trait,  subtlety; 
the  joy — which  at  times  seems  to  border  on  malicious- 
ness— of  stretching  and  forcing  things  into  an  artistic 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSKRIT.  25 

garment,  of  building  up  labyrinths  of  fine  points,  in 
whose  involved  courses  the  skilled  and  cunning  stu- 
dent ostentatiously  thought  himself  able  to  find  his 
way.  Thus,  in  this  grammatical  science,  understanding 
and  misunderstanding  of  the  real  truth  are  mingled 
in  inexplicable  confusion.  That  under  the  hands  of 
such  linguistic  theorists  the  precious  wealth  of  the 
old  Vedic  hymns  has  not  remained  inviolate,  is  easily 
comprehended.  In  some  cases,  isolated  details  of 
the  traditions  of  prior  epochs  were  caught  and  clung 
to  with  felicitous  acumen  ;  in  others,  no  hesitation 
was  had  in  wiping  out  of  existence  entire  domains  of 
old  and  genuine  phenomena  to  suit  half-correct  theo- 
ries, so  that  the  most  patient  ingenuity  of  modern 
science  will  only  be  able  to  restore  in  part  what  has 
been  lost. 

Finally,  however,  the  caprice  under  which  the 
hymns  of  the  old  singers  must  have  suffered,  had  its 
end.  The  more  people  accustomed  themselves  to  see  in 
these  poems  not  merely  beautiful  and  efficacious 
prayers  but  a  sacred  revelation  of  the  divine,  the  higher 
did  their  transmitted  form — even  when  this  is,  or  seems 
to  be,  of  necessity,  so  irregular — rise  in  the  respect  of 
theologians,  and  the  more  careful  must  they  have  been 
to  describe  and  preserve  this  form  with  all  its  dissim- 
ilarities. 

We  possess  a  remarkable  work — it  is  composed  in 
verse  like  many  Hindu  treatises  and  hand-books — in 
which  a  grammarian,  Caunaka,  who  must  probably  be 
placed  about  the  time  400  B.  C,  has  given  a  deep  and 
unusually  well-planned  survey  of  the  vocal  peculiar- 
ities of  the  Rig  Veda  text.  The  study  of  Caunaka's 
work  affords  us  the  proof  that  frotn  that  time  on  the 
Vedic  hymns,  protected  by  the  united  care  of  gram- 


26  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

matical  and  religious  respect  for  letters,  have  suffered 
no  further  appreciable  corruptions.  The  most  im- 
portant manuscripts  of  the  Rig  Veda  which  we  know, 
may  be  two  thousand  years  later  than  this  hand-book 
of  Caunaka's,  but  they  bear  all  tests  in  a  remarkable 
way  if  we  compare  them  with  it. 

The  Rig  Veda,  indeed,  which  that  Hindu  scholar 
found,  was  not  unlike  a  ruin.  And  it  was  hardly  pos- 
sible by  the  help  of  Hindu  scholarship  to  transmit  it 
to  posterity  in  a  better  condition  than  it  was  received 
But  still  the  conscientious  diligence  of  the  Hindu  lin- 
guists and  divines  accomplished  something  :  for  the 
last  two  thousand  years  it  has  preserved  these  vener- 
able fragments  from  the  dangers  of  further  decay. 
They  lie  there,  untouched,  just  as  they  were  in  the 
days  of  Caunaka.  And  the  investigation  of  our  day, 
which  has  already  succeeded  in  bringing  forth  from 
many  a  field  of  ruins  the  living  features  of  a  by-gone 
existence,  is  at  work  among  them,  now  with  the  bold 
grasp  of  confident  divination,  now  in  the  quiet  uni- 
formity of  slowly  advancing  deliberation,  to  deduce 
whatever  it  may  of  the  real  forms  of  those  old  priestly 
poems. 


III. 


We  may  say,  that  the  greatest  undertakings  planned 
and  the  most  important  results  achieved  in  the  field 
of  Sanskrit  research,  are  linked  with  the  names  of  Ger- 
man investigators.  If  we  add  that  this  could  not  easily 
be  otherwise,  it  is  not  from  national  vanity;  we  should 
but  express  the  actual  facts  of  the  case,  based  upon 
the  development  of  the  science.     It  was  natural  that 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSKRIT.  27 

the  first  movements  toward  the  founding  of  Hindu  re- 
search, the  first  attempts  to  grasp  the  vastly  accumu- 
lated material  and  find  provisional  forms  for  it,  should 
have  been  the  work  of  Englishmen,  men  who  spent  a 
good  part  of  their  lives  in  India,  and  were  there 
brought  in  constant  contact  with  native  Sanskrit 
scholars.  But  not  less  natural  was  it  that  the  honor 
of  instituting  further  progress  and  gaining  a  deeper  in- 
sight should  be  accorded  to  Germans.  The  two  fields 
of  knowledge  by  which,  especially,  life  and  power  were 
imparted  to  Hindu  investigations  were  and  are  essen- 
tially German.  These  are  comparative  grammar,  which 
we  may  say  was  founded  by  Bopp,  and  that  profound 
and  potent  science,  or  perhaps  more  correctly  ex- 
pressed art,  of  philology,  which  was  practiced  by 
Gottfried  Hermann,  and  likewise  by  Karl  Lachmann, 
a  man  imbued  with  the  proud  spirit  of  Lessing,  full  of 
acute  and  purposeful  ability,  exact  and  truthful  in 
small  matters  as  in  great.  Representatives  of  this 
philology,  moved  to  antipathy  by  many  characteristic 
features  of  the  Hindu  spirit,  and  not  the  least  influ- 
enced by  the  assertion  that  Latin  and  Greek  grammar 
has  this  or  that  to  learn  from  the  Sanskrit,  might  meet 
the  new  science  of  India  with  reserve  or  more  than 
reserve.  Still  this  could  in  no  wise  alter  the  truth  that 
the  study  of  Hindu  texts,  the  investigation  of  Hindu 
literary  remains,  could  be  learned  from  no  better  teach- 
ers than  from  those  masters  who  had  succeeded  in  im- 
proving and  interpreting  the  classical  texts  with  un- 
erring certainty  and  excellence  of  method. 

It  was  a  Leipsic  disciple  of  Hermann  and  Haupt 
who,  at  the  instigation  of  Burnouf,  in  1845,  in  Paris, 
conceived  the  plan  of  publishing  the  Rig  Veda  with 
the  commentary  of  its  Hindu  expounder,  the  abbot  Sa- 


28  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

yana,  who  flourished  in  the  14th  century  after  Christ. 
This  was  the  great  work  of  Max  Muller,  the  first  of 
of  those  fundamental  undertakings  on  which  Vedic 
philology  rests.  It  was  necessary  above  all  to  know 
how  the  Brahmins  themselves  translated  the  hymns 
of  their  forefathers,  which  were  preserved  in  the  Rig 
Veda,  from  the  Vedic  language  into  current  Sanskrit, 
and  how  they  solved  the  problems  which  the  grammar 
of  the  Veda  presented,  by  the  means  their  own  gram- 
matical system  offers.  Herein  lay  the  indispensable 
foundation  of  all  further  investigation.  It  was  ne- 
cessary to  weigh  the  Hindu  traditions  concerning  the 
explanation  of  the  Veda,  which  erred  in  underestima- 
tion as  well  as  overestimation,  and  to  test  the  conse- 
quences of  both  errors,  in  order  finally  to  learn  the  art 
of  scientifically  estimating  them.  This  constitutes  the 
great  importance  of  Max  Muller's  work  extending 
through  a  quarter  of  a  century  (1849-1874).  To  com- 
plete was  easy,  but  to  begin  was  exceedingly  difficult ; 
for  most  of  the  grammatical  and  theological  texts 
which  formed  the  basis  for  Sayana's  deductions,  were, 
when  Max  Muller  began  the  work,  books  sealed  with 
seven  seals. 

A  few  years  after  the  first  volume  of  Max  Muller's 
Rig  Veda  appeared,  two  other  scholars  united  in  a 
work  of  still  greater  magnitude.  It  has  long  since  be- 
come to  all  Sanskritists  the  most  indispensable  tool 
for  their  labors.  I  refer  to  the  Sanskrit  dictionary, 
compiled  under  the  commission  of  the  Academy  of 
St.  Petersburg,  Russia,  by  Roth  and  Bohtlingk.  It 
was  intended  to  make  a  dictionary  for  a  language  the 
greatest  and  most  important  part  of  whose  texts  were 
still  not  in  print.  The  work  was  similar  to  that 
which  the  Grimm  Brothers  began  at  the  same  time 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSKRIT.  29 

for  the  German  language.  Roth  undertook  the  Vedic 
literature,  the  foundation  of  the  whole ;  Bohtlingk  the 
later  periods.  Friendly  investigators,  and  especially 
Weber,  helped  them  by  bringing  into  use  the  known 
and  accessible  texts  or  manuscripts  that  were  service- 
able to  them.  The  most  important  thing  was,  that  the 
Veda  had  now  for  the  first  time — setting  aside  a  few 
previous  studies — to  be  gone  through  with  a  view  to 
lexicography.  The  explanations  which  the  Hindus 
themselves  were  wont  to  give  of  the  words  of  the  Vedic 
language  were  regarded  as  a  valuable  aid  for  under- 
standing it.  But  the  matter  did  not  rest  here.  "We 
do  not  hold  it,"  said  the  two  compilers  in  their  preface, 
"  to  be  our  task  to  acquire  that  understanding  of  the 
Veda  which  was  current  in  India  some  centuries  ago ; 
but  we  seek  the  sense  which  the  poets  themselves  gave 
to  their  hymns  and  maxims."  They  undertook  "to  get 
at  the  sense  from  the  texts  themselves,  by  collating 
all  the  passages  related  in  word  or  meaning."  In  this 
way  they  hoped  to  re-establish  the  meaning  of  each 
word,  not  as  a  colorless  conception,  but  in  its  individu- 
ality and  therefore  in  its  strength  and  beauty.  The 
Veda  was  thus  to  re-acquire  its  living  sense,  the  full 
wealth  of  its  expression.  The  thought  of  the  earliest 
antiquity  was  to  appear  to  us  in  new  forms  full  of  life 
and  reality. 

The  execution  of  this  work,  carried  on  with  tena- 
cious industry  and  brilliant  success  for  four  and  twenty 
years  (1852-1875),  did  not  fall  short  of  the  magnitude 
of  the  plan  originally  conceived.  In  minor  points  we 
find  it  easy  to  point  out  numerous  deficiencies  and 
errors.  The  two  compilers  well  knew  that  without 
that  spirit  of  boldness  which  does  not  stand  in  fear  of 
unavoidable  errors,  it  were  better  never  to  undertake 


30  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

their  task.  In  face,  however,  of  the  great  value  of  that 
which  they  have  accomplished,  all  faults  sink  into  in- 
significance. 

What  a  chasm  separates  their  work  from  that  of 
their  predecessor,  Wilson  !  *  In  Wilson's  work  there  is 
little  more  than  a  fair  enumeration  of  the  meanings 
which  Hindu  traditions  assigned  to  the  words  ;  for  his 
dictionary  the  Veda  scarcely  exists,  if  it  does  so  at  all. 
Here  in  the  work  of  Roth  and  Bohtlingk  on  the  other 
hand,  is  brought  to  light  the  immense  wealth,  replete 
with  oriental  splendor,  of  the  richest  of  all  languages ; 
the  history  of  each  word,  and  likewise  the  fortunes 
that  have  befallen  it  in  the  different  periods  of  the  lit- 
erature and  have  determined  its  meaning,  are  brought 
before  our  eyes.  The  difference  between  the  two  great 
periods  in  which  the  development  of  Hindu  research 
falls,  could  not  be  incorporated  more  clearly  than  in 
these  two  dictionaries.  In  the  one  instance  are  found 
the  beginnings,  which  English  science,  resting  imme- 
diately on  the  shoulders  of  the  Indian  pandits,  has 
made ;  in  the  other  is  the  continuation  of  English 
work  conducted  by  strict  philological  methods  to  a 
breadth  and  depth  incomparably  beyond  those  begin- 
nings, and  at  the  head  of  this  undertaking  stand  Ger- 
man scholars. 

To  Miiller's  great  edition  of  the  Rig  Veda  and  to 
the  St.  Petersburg  Dictionary  further  investigations 
have  been  added  in  great  abundance,  and  these  have 
more  and  more  extended  the  limits  of  our  knowledge 
of  the  Veda.  Already  a  new  generation  of  laborers 
have  taken  their  places  beside  the  original  pioneers  in 
these  once  so  impassable  regions.  As  a  whole,  or  in 
its  separate  parts,  the  Rig  Veda  has  been  repeatedly 

♦  Wilson's  dictionary  appeared  in  1819;  a  second  edition  in  1832. 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSKRIT.  31 

translated.  Its  stock  of  words  and  inflections  has  been 
studied  and  overhauled  from  ever  new  points  of  view 
and  with  ever  new  questions  in  mind.  To  many  a 
picturesque  word  of  the  strong,  harsh  Vedic  language 
its  full  weight  has  thus  been  given  back. 

The  principles  and  practices  according  to  which 
the  old  collectors  and  revisers  of  the  Veda  text  pro- 
ceeded, are  now  being  examined  by  us  with  a  view  to 
being  able  to  determine  what  came  into  their  hands 
as  tradition  and  what  they  themselves  imported  into 
the  traditions.  The  readings  of  the  passages  quoted 
from  the  Rig  Veda  in  the  other  Vedas  are  being  col- 
lected, in  order  to  trace  in  them  the  remains  of  the 
genuine  and  oldest  textual  form.  The  religion  and 
mythology  of  the  Veda  have  been  described ;  the  na- 
tional life  of  the  Vedic  tribes  has  been  portrayed  in 
all  its  phases.  The  texts  afford  the  data  for  such  a 
portraiture  of  these  features  that  it  has  justly  been 
said  that  the  description  given  surpasses  in  clearness 
and  accuracy  Tacitus's  account  of  the  national  life  of 
the  Germans.*  Finally  an  attempt  has  been  made — 
or  rather  an  attempt  will  have  to  be  made,  for  even  at 
this  time  the  work  is  in  its  beginnings — to  discover 
amid  the  masses  of  Vedic  prayers  and  sacrificial 
hymns  something  which  must  be  an  especially  welcome 
find  to  scientific  curiosity — the  beginning  of  the  Indian 
Epic.f 

There  could  be  no  doubt  that  in  so  poetical  a 
period  the  pleasure  of  romancing  produced  abundant 
fruit.     Short  narratives,  short  hymns  must  then  have 

♦  H.  Zimmer  :  Altindisches  Leben  :  die  Cultur  der  vedischen  Arier,  (Ancient 
Indian  Life  :  the  Civilization  of  the  Vedic  Aryans.)  Berlin,  1879,  p.  vii. 

t  The  remarks  here  made  on  the  beginnings  of  the  Ind'in  Epic  rest  on 
conceptions  which  I  have  before  briefly  sought  to  establish.  Zeitschrift 
der  Deutichen  Morgenland,  GeselUch.,  1885,  p.  52,  et  seq. 


3a  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

existed,  enclosed,  as  it  were,  in  narrow  frames.  Thus, 
in  general,  are  the  beginnings  of  epic  poetry  shaped, 
before  poetic  ability  rises  and  ventures  to  narrate  in 
wider  scope  and  with  more  complicated  structure  the 
fate  of  men  and  heroes.  It  seemed,  however,  as  though 
those  beginnings  of  the  Indian  epic  were  lost.  But 
they  were  preserved,  though  to  be  sure  in  a  peculiarly 
fragmentary  form.  In  the  Rig  Veda  there  is  many  a 
medley  of  apparently  disconnected  verses  in  which 
we  have  thought  to  discover  the  accumulated  sweep- 
ings of  poetic  woirkshops.  In  fact  we  have  here  the 
fragmentary  remains  of  epic  narratives.  These  verses 
were  once  inserted  in  a  prose  framework ;  the  narrative 
part  of  the  Epic  being  in  prose,  and  the  speeches  and 
counter-speeches  in  verse,  just  as,  often,  in  Grimm's 
fairy-tales  when  the  poor  daughter  of  the  king  or  the 
powerful  dwarf  has  to  speak  an  especially  weighty  or 
touching  word,  a  rhyme  or  two  appears. 

Now,  only  the  verses  were  memorized  in  their 
fixed  original  form  by  the  Vedic  tale-tellers.  The 
prose,  each  new  narrator  would  render  with  fresh 
words ;  until  finally  its  original  subject-matter  fell  into 
almost  total  oblivion,  and  the  verses  alone  survived, 
appearing  sometimes  as  a  series  of  dialogues  suffi- 
ciently long  and  full  of  meaning  to  enable  us  to  gain 
an  understanding  of  the  whole,  and  then  again  as  un- 
recognizable fragments  no  more  admitting  an  infer- 
ence as  to  their  proper  place  and  connection  in  the 
story  of  which  they  form  a  part  than — to  keep  the 
same  comparison — a  couple  of  rhymes  in  one  of 
Grimm's  fairy-tales  would  enable  us  to  restore  the 
whole  tale. 

It  may  be  permitted  for  the  sake  of  making  clear 
what  has  been  said,  to  cite  here  a  passage  from  one  of 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSKRIT. 


33 


those  old  narratives  whose  connection,  at  least  as  a 
whole,  may  be  conjecturally  determined.*  The  scene 
is  between  gods  and  demons,  its  subject  is  the  great 
battle  which  was  fought  in  heaven,  the  thunder  fight, 
which  for  the  strife-loving  spirit  of  that  age  was  the 
pattern  of  their  own  victories.  Vritra,  the  envious 
fiend,  kept  the  waters  of  the  clouds  in  captivity,  that  they 
might  not  pour  down  upon  the  earth ;  but  God  Indra 
smote  the  demon  with  his  thunderbolt  and  let  the  lib- 
erated waters  flow.  Indra — this  must  have  been  said 
in  the  lost  prose  introduction  to  the  narrative — felt,  as 
he  entered  the  battle,  too  weak  for  his  terrible  oppo- 
nent. The  gods,  faint-hearted,  withdrew  from  his 
side.  Only  one  offered  himself  as  an  ally,  Vayu  (the 
wind),t  the  swiftest  of  the  gods,  but  he  demanded  as  a 
reward  for  his  fidelity,  part  of  the  sacrificial  draught 
of  Soma,  which  men  offer  to  Indra,     Vayu  speaks  : 

"  Tis  I.    I  come  to  thee  the  foremost,  as  is  meet ; 
Behind  me  march  in  full  array,  the  Gods. 
Givest  thou  me,  O  Indra,  but  a  share  of  sacrifice, 
And  thou  shalt  do,  with  my  alliance,  valiant  deeds  of  might." 

Indra  accepted  the  alliance  : 

"  of  the  honied  draught  I  give  thee  the  first  portion ; 
Thine  shall  it  be ;  for  thee  shall  be  pressed  the  Soma. 
Thou  shalt  stand  as  friend  at  my  right  hand  ; 
Then  shall  we  slay  the  serried  hosts  of  our  foe." 

Then  a  new  person  appears,  a  human  singer.  We 
know  not  whether  a  definite  one  among  the  great 
saints  of  that  early  time,  the  prophets  of  the  later 
generation  of  singers,  was  thought  of  or  not.  He 
wished  to  praise  Indra  ;  but  can  Indra  now  be  praised? 
The  hostile  demon  is  not  yet  conquered  ;  doubts  as  to 

*  Rig  Veda  8,ioo.  I  omit  a  few  verses  of  obscure  meaning,  and  say  noth- 
ing of  difficulties,  for  which  this  is  not  the  place  to  give  a  solution. 

+  He  is  also  called  Vata.  This  name  has  been  identified — though  the  cor- 
rectness of  this  is  highly  questionable — with  the  German  name  Woden. 


34  ANCIENT  INDIA 

Indra  and  his  might  come  to  the  singer.     He  says  to 
his  people  : 

"  A  song  of  praise  bring  ye  who  long  for  a  blessing, 
If  truth  be  truth,  sing  ye  the  praise  of  Indra." 

"  There  is  no  Indra,"  then  said  many  a  one, 

"  Who  saw  him  ?    Who  is  he  whom  we  shall  praise  ?" 

Then  Indra  himself  gives  answer  to  the  weak- 
hearted  : 

"  Here  stand  I  before  thee,  look  hither,  O  Singei 
In  lofty  strength  I  tower  above  all  beings. 
The  laws  of  sacred  order  make  me  strong ; 
I,  the  smiter,  smite  the  worlds." 

The  confidence  of  the  pious  in  their  God  is  re- 
stored, his  hymn  of  praise  is  sounded.  And  now  Indra 
enters  the  conflict.  The  falcon  has  brought  him  the 
Soma,  and  in  the  intoxication  of  the  ambrosial  drink, 
the  victorious  one  hurls  his  thunderbolt  at  the  demon. 
Like  a  tree  smitten  by  lightning,  falls  the  enemy.  Now 
the  waters  may  flow  forth  from  their  prisons  : 

"  Now  hasten  forth  I  Scatter  thyself  freely  i 
He  who  detained  thee  is  no  more. 
Deep  into  the  side  of  Vitra  has  been  hurled 
The  dreaded  thunderbolt  of  Indra. 

"  Swift  as  thought   sped  the  Falcon  along; 
Pierced  into  the  citadel,  the  brazen. 
And  up  to  heaven,  to  the  thunderer. 
The  soaring  falcon  bore  the  Soma. 

"  In  the  sea  the  thunderbolt  rests, 
Deep  engulfed  in  the  watery  billows. 
The  flowing  and  ever-constant  waters 
To  him  bring  generous  gifts." 

I  pass  over  the  difficult  conclusion  of  the  poem — 
the  creation  of  language  by  Indra  after  the  battle  with 
Vitra.  One  fourth  of  the  languages  that  exist  on  earth, 
Indra  formed  into  clear  and  intelligible  speech ;  these 
are  the  languages  of  men.  The  other  three  fourths, 
however,   have    remained   indistinct    and   incompre- 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSKRIT.  35 

hensible  ;  these  are  the  languages  that  quadrupeds  and 
birds  and  all  insects  speak. 

This  is  one  of  the  early  narratives  of  the  Hindus 
concerning  the  deeds  of  their  gods  and  heroes.  We 
must  not  endeavor  here,  to  restore  the  lost  portions 
written  in  prose  which  served  to  connect  the  strophes. 
To  make  the  modern  reader  clear  as  to  the  connection 
of  the  verses,  another  method  of  expression  must  be 
chosen  than  that  peculiar  to  the  narrators  of  the  Vedic 
epoch.  As  it  appears,  they  were  content  with  recount- 
ing the  necessary  facts,  or  rather  with  recalling  them 
to  their  hearers,  in  short  and  scanty  sentences. 

The  verses  set  in  the  narrative  are  not  wanting, 
however,  in  flights  of  poetic  eloquence — as  the  poem 
of  Indra's  battle  will  have  shown.  Without  the  finer 
shades  of  human  soul-life,  it  is  true,  yet  in  earnest 
simple  greatness,  like  mountains  or  old  gigantic  trees, 
the  heroic  figures  of  these  ancient  sagas  stand  forth. 
What  takes  place  among  them  is  similar,  nay  more 
than  similar,  to  that  which  takes  place  in  nature.  For 
as  yet  the  primitive  natural  significance  of  those  gods 
has  hardly  been  veiled  by  the  human  vesture  which 
they  wear,  and  in  the  narratives  of  their  deeds  the 
great  pictures  of  nature's  life  with  its  wonders  and 
terrors  are  everywhere  present.  The  duty  of  bringing 
together  and  interpreting  such  fragments  of  this  most 
ancient  Epic  activity,  Vedic  investigators  must  reckon 
among  their  most  fruitful  though  perhaps  not  their 
easiest  tasks. 

IV. 

At  this  stage  of  our  inquiry,  the  question  arises. 
What  do  we  know  of  the  history  of  India  in  the 
age  which  produced  the  Vedas  ?    Where  does  the  pos- 


36  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

sibility  here  begin  of  fixing  events  chronologically  ? 
In  that  part  of  the  province  of  history  in  which  this 
precision  is  lacking,  can  any  determinate  lines  of  an- 
other sort  be  drawn  ? 

Of  a  history  of  ancient  India  in  the  sense  in  which 
we  speak  of  the  history  of  Rome,  or  in  the  manner  in 
which  the  history  of  the  Israelitic  nation  is  recounted 
in  the  Old  Testament,  the  Vedas  afford  us  no  testi- 
mony, A  succession  of  events  clearly  united  with  one 
another,  the  presence  of  energetic  personalities,  whose 
aspirations  and  achievements  we  can  understand,  mo- 
mentous struggles  for  the  institution  and  security  of 
civil  government — these  are  things  of  which  nothing 
is  told  to  us.  We  may  add  that  these  are  things  which 
seem  to  have  existed  in  Ancient  India  less  than  in  any 
other  civilized  nation.  The  more  we  know  of  the  his- 
tory of  this  people  the  more  it  appears  like  an  incohe- 
rent mass  of  chance  occurrences.  These  occurrences 
are  wanting  in  that  firm  bearing  and  significant  sense 
which  the  power  of  a  willing  and  conscious  national 
purpose  imparts  to  its  doings.  Only  in  the  history  of 
thought,  and  especially  of  religious  thought,  do  we 
tread,  in  India,  upon  solid  ground.  Of  a  history  in  any 
other  sense  we  can  here  scarcely  speak.  And  a  peo- 
ple who  has  no  history,  has  of  course  no  written  his- 
torical works. 

In  those  eras  in  which,  among  soundly  organized 
nations,  interest  in  the  past  and  its  connection 
with  the  struggles  and  sufferings  of  the  present 
awakes,  when  the  Herodotuses  and  Fabiuses,  the  nar- 
rators of  that  which  has  happened,  are  wont  to  arise, 
the  literary  activity  of  India  was  absorbed  in  theolog- 
ical and  philosophical  speculation.  In  all  occurrences 
was  seen  but  one  aspect,  namely,  that  they  were  tran- 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSKRIT.  37 

sitory;  and  everything  transitory  was  recognized,  we 
may  not  say  as  a  simile,  yet  as  something  absolutely 
worthless,  an  unfortunate  nothing,  from  which  the 
sage  was  bound  to  divert  his  thoughts. 

We  can  thus  easily  see  how  fully  we  must  renounce 
our  hopes  of  an  exact  result,  when  the  question  is 
raised  as  to  the  time  to  which  the  little  we  know  of  the 
outer  vicissitudes  of  the  ancient  Hindu  tribes  must 
be  assigned,  and,  especially,  as  to  the  time  in  which  the 
great  literary  remains  of  the  Veda  and  the  changes 
which  it  wrought  in  the  Hindu  world  of  thought  be- 
long. The  basis  that  might  serve  toward  definitely 
answering  these  questions  of  chronology — lists  of 
kings  with  statements  of  the  duration  of  each  reign — 
is  wholly  wanting  for  the  Vedic  period.  Of  early 
times  at  least  no  such  lists  have  been  handed  down  to 
us;  there  are  no  traces  indeed  that  such  ever  existed. 
The  later  catalogues,  however,  which  have  been  fab- 
ricated in  the  shops  of  the  Indian  compilers,  can  to- 
day no  more  be  taken  into  consideration  as  the  basis 
of  earnest  research,  than  the  statements  of  the  Roman 
chroniclers  as  to  how  many  years  King  Romulus  and 
King  Numa  reigned.  How  unusual  it  was  in  the  Ve- 
dic times  for  the  Hindus  to  ask  the  "when"  of  events, 
is  shown  very  clearly  by  the  fact,  that  no  expression  was 
in  current  use  by  which  any  year  but  the  present  was 
distinguishable  from  any  other  year. 

The  result  of  this  for  us,  and  likewise,  of  course, 
for  the  science  of  Ancient  India,  is  that  those  long 
centuries  were  and  are  practically  synonymous  with 
immeasurable  time.  The  standard  by  which  we  are 
accustomed  to  compute  the  distance  of  historical  ante- 
cedence in  our  thoughts  or  imaginations,  fail  us  in  this 
richly  developed  civilization  as  completely  as  in  the 


38  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

prehistoric  domains  of  the  stone  age,  —  in  the  first 
feeble  glimmerings  of  human  existence.  In  fact,  as 
prehistoric  research  tries  to  compute  the  duration  of 
the  past  ages  which  have  given  to  the  earth's  surface 
its  form,  so  as  to  determine  approximately  the  age  of 
the  human  remains  embedded  in  the  strata  of  the 
earth;  so,  in  a  similar  way,  the  investigation  of  the 
Hindu  Vedas,  in  its  attempts  to  compute  the  age  of 
the  Veda,  has  sought  refuge  in  the  gradual  changes 
that  have  imperceptibly  taken  place  in  the  course  of 
centuries,  in  that  great  time-measurer,  the  starry 
heavens. 

There  was  found  in  a  work,  classed  as  one  of  the 
Vedas,  an  astronomical  statement  which  has  served  as 
a  basis  for  such  computations.  The  result  attained 
was  that  this  particular  work  datedfrom  the  year  1181 
B.  C.  (according  to  another  reckoning  1391  B.  C). 
Unfortunately,  the  belief  that  in  this  way  certain  data 
are  to  be  acquired  had  to  vanish  quickly  enough.  It 
was  soon  found  out  that  the  Vedic  statement  is  not 
sufficient  to  afford  any  tenable  basis  for  astronomical 
computations.  Thus  it  remains  that  for  the  times  of 
the  Vedas  there  is  no  fixed  chronological  date.  And  to 
any  one  who  knows  of  what  things  the  Hindu  au- 
thors were  wont  to  speak,  and  of  what  not,  it  will  be 
tolerably  certain,  that  even  the  richest  and  most  unex- 
pected discoveries  of  new  texts,  though  they  may 
vastly  extend  our  knowledge  in  other  respects,  will  in 
this  respect  make  no  changes  whatever. 

There  are  two  great  events  in  the  history  of  India 
with  which  this  darkness  begins  to  be  dispelled — the 
one  approximately,  and  the  other  accurately,  referable 
to  an  ascertainable  point  of  time.  These  are  the  ad- 
vent of  Buddha  and  the  contact  of  the  Hindus  with 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSKRIT.  39 

the  Greeks  under  Alexander  the  Great  and  his  succes- 
sors. 

That  it  was  the  old  Buddhistic  communities  in  In- 
dia that  first  began  the  work  of  gathering  up  the  con- 
nected traditions  within  historical  memory,  seems 
certain.  At  least  this  corresponds  with  the  apparent 
and  accepted  course  of  events.  To  Vedic  and  Brah- 
manical  philosophy  all  earthly  fortunes  were  abso- 
lutely worthless — a*  vanity  of  vanities;  and  over 
against  them  stood  the  significant  stillness  of  the  Eter- 
nal, undisturbed  by  any  change.  But  for  the  follow- 
ers of  Buddha,  there  was  a  point  at  which  this  Eternal 
entered  the  world  of  temporal  things,  and  thus  there 
was  for  them  a  piece  of  history  which  maintained  its 
place  beside  or  rather  directly  within  their  religious 
teachings.  This  was  the  history  of  the  advent  of 
Buddha  and  the  life  of  the  communities  founded  by 
him. 

There  is  a  firm  recollection  of  the  assemblies  in 
which  the  most  honored  and  learned  leaders  of  the 
communities,  and  great  bands  of  monks  coming  to- 
gether from  far  and  wide,  determined  weighty  points 
of  doctrine  and  ritual.  The  kings  under  whom 
these  councils  were  held  are  named,  and  the  prede- 
cessors of  these  kings  are  mentioned  even  as  far 
back  as  the  pious  King  Bimbisara,  the  contemporary 
and  zealous  protector  of  Buddha.  Of  the  series  of 
kings  which  in  this  way  have  been  fixed  by  the  chron- 
icles of  the  Buddhistic  order,  two  figures  are  espe- 
cially prominent — Tschandragupta  (t.  e.,  the  one  pro- 
tected by  the  Moon)  and  his  grandson  Asoka  (the 
Painless).  Tschandragupta  is  a  personality  well  known 
to  Greek  and  Roman  historians.  They  call  him  San- 
drokyptos,  and  relate  that  after  the  death  of  Alexander 


40  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

the  Great  (in  the  year  323  B.  C),  he  successfully  op- 
posed the  power  of  the  Greeks  on  their  invasion  into 
India,  and  lifted  himself  from  a  humble  position  to 
that  of  ruler  of  a  wide  kingdom.  Asoka,  on  the  other 
hand,  is  not  mentioned  by  the  Greeks;  but  in  one  of 
his  inscriptions — by  him  were  made  the  oldest  inscrip- 
tions discovered  in  India,  and  these  have  been  found 
on  walls  and  pillars  in  the  most  distant  parts  of  the 
peninsula — he  himself  speaks  of  Antijoka,  king  of  the 
lona  (lonians,  /.  e.,  Greeks),  Antikina,  Alikasandara, 
and  other  Greek  monarchs.* 

Here  at  last  a  place  is  reached  where  the  his- 
torical investigator  of  India  reaches  firm  ground. 
Events  whose  years  and  centuries — as  though  they 
occurred  on  another  planet — are  not  commensurable 
with  those  of  the  earth,  meet  at  this  point  with  spheres 
of  events  which  we  know  and  are  able  to  measure.  If 
we  reckon  back  from  the  fixed  dates  of  Tschandra- 
gupta  and  Asoka  to  Buddha — and  we  have  no  grounds 
for  regarding  the  statements  of  time  which  we  find  re- 
specting Buddhistic  chronology  as  not  at  least  ap- 
proximately correct — we  find  the  year  of  the  great 
teacher's  death  to  be  about  480  B.  C.  His  work  there- 
fore falls  in  the  time  at  which  the  Greeks  fought  their 
battles  for  freedom  from  Persian  rule,  and  the  funda- 
mental lines  of  a  republican  constitution  were  drawn 
in  Rome. 

Buddha's  life,  however,  marks  the  extreme  limit  at 
which  we  may  find  even  approximate  dates.  Beyond 
this,   through   the   long   centuries   which  must  have 

♦Antijoka  isAntiochasTheos;  Antikina,  Antigonos  Gonatos;  Alikasandara, 
of  course,  not  Alexander  the  Great,  but  Alexander  of  Epirus,  son  of  Pyr- 
rhus,  the  enemy  of  the  Romans.  All  these  princes  reigned  about  the  middle 
of  the  third  century  B.  C.  Of  Alexander  the  Great  in  India  no  traces  have 
been  found,  with  the  exception  of  a  coin  which  bears  bis  picture  and  his  name 


THE  STUDY  OF  SANSKRIT.  41 

elapsed  from  the  beginning  of  the  Rig  Veda  epoch  to 
that  of  Buddha,  the  question  still  remains:  What  was 
the  succession  of  events — the  few  events  of  which  we 
may  speak  ?  What  the  order  in  which  the  great  strata 
of  literary  remains  were  formed  ?  We  observe  the  re- 
lation which  one  text  bears  to  the  others  which  appear 
to  have  previously  existed;  we  follow  the  gradual 
changes  which  the  language  has  suffered,  the  blotting 
out  of  old  words  and  forms  and  the  appearance  of  new 
ones;  we  count  the  long  and  short  syllables  of  the 
verses  so  as  to  learn  the  imperceptible  but  strictly  reg- 
ular course  by  which  their  rhythms  have  been  freed 
from  old  laws  of  construction  and  subjected  to  new 
forms;  moving  in  a  parallel  direction  with  these  lin- 
guistic and  metrical  changes  we  note  the  changes  of 
religious  ideas,  and  of  the  contents  as  well  as  the  ex- 
ternal forms  of  intellectual  and  spiritual  life.  Thus  we 
learn  in  the  chaos  of  this  literature  ever  more  surely  to 
distinguish  the  old  from  the  new,  and  understand  the 
course  of  development  which  has  run  through  both. 

Many  a  path,  it  is  true,  in  which  research  hoped 
to  press  forward,  has  been  shown  to  be  delusive 
and  worthless  ;  problems  have  had  to  be  given  up, 
changed,  and  presented  in  different  forms.  But  in  its 
last  results  the  work  has  not  been  in  vain.  For,  in 
respect  to  the  Veda  in  particular,  and  the  antiquities 
of  India  in  general,  we  have  learned  to  recognize  the 
principal  directions  in  which  the  tendencies  of  histor- 
ical growth  are  to  be  traced. 

From  the  second  century  of  Hindu  research  we  can 
scarcely  expect  discoveries  similar  to  those  which  the 
first  has  brought:  such  a  sudden  uprising  of  unusual, 
broad,  fruitful  fields  of  historical  knowledge.  But 
we  may  still  hope  that  the  future  of  our  science  will 


42  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

bring  results  of  another  sort  no  less  rich — the  expla- 
nation of  hitherto  inexplicable  phenomena,  the  trans- 
formation of  that  which  is  half  known  into  that  which 
is  fully  known. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA. 


OUT  of  all  the  rack  and  ruin  of  Indian  antiquity, 
the  most  momentous  objects,  which  the  investi- 
gator can  hope  to  render  comprehensible  to  the  modern 
reader,  are  the  great  religions  of  ancient  India.  At 
their  head  stands  the  religion  embodied  in  the  literature 
of  the  Veda — a  belief  closely  related  to  the  ancient  reli- 
gions of  the  principal  European  peoples,  but  retaining 
in  a  clearer  manner  than  they  the  marks  of  distant  pre- 
historic stages,  the  traces  of  mighty  commotions  in 
which  man's  religious  thought  and  feeling  laboriously 
struggled  forth  from  the  crude  confusion  of  primitive 
ages  to  nobler  and  more  elevated  forms.  The  religion 
of  the  Veda  is  in  its  turn  replaced  by  the  teaching 
of  Buddha, — the  one,  the  sternly  practical  religion 
of  conquering  shepherd-chieftains  and  their  priests, 
the  other,  the  world-renouncing  doctrine  of  salvation- 
seeking  monks.  Far-reaching  analogies  interweave  the 
ideals,  for  which  the  followers  of  the  Shakya's  son  for- 
sook their  homes  for  a  life  of  wandering,  with  thoughts 
evolved  in  the  Western  world,  especially  in  Greece.  It 
seems  practicable  to  reduce  this  development  of  the 
religious  nature,  proceeding  as  it  did  in  parallel  direc- 
tions among  peoples  so  widely  separated,  to  a  single 
general  formula,  that  would  set  forth  the  agreement  of 
the  various  powerful  impulses  working  among  them. 


44  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

It  will,  I  trust,  be  permitted  a  fellow  worker  in  the 
exploration  of  these  domains,  to  describe  and  to  ap- 
praise the  value  of  the  attempts  which  science  has 
made,  and  is  yet  making,  to  interpret  these  primeval 
monuments  of  human  searching,  longing,  hoping,  and 
to  assign  to  them  their  proper  place  in  history.  But 
dare  he  make  the  attempt  to  conjure  forth  the  figures 
themselves  of  that  prehistoric  world,  those  rare  ones 
of  silver,  and  with  them  the  more  numerous  throng  of 
inferior  metal :  can  he  succeed  in  fixing  them,  even 
though  he  leave  the  outlines  somewhat  doubtful  and 
obscure  ? 


The  gods  and  myths  of  earliest  India  became  ac- 
cessible to  research  when  the  latter  possessed  itself  of 
the  Rig- Veda,  a  collection  of  more  than  a  thousand 
hymns — the  great  majority  of  them  sacrificial  hymns. 
I  have  described  in  the  introductory  essay  of  this 
volume,  how  the  knowledge  of  the  Rig-Veda  was  ac- 
quired, and  how  by  hard  but  rapid  philological  work 
its  obscurities  were  surely  and  steadily  overcome.  A 
feeling  of  awe  was  involuntarily  felt  on  reading  those 
poems,  the  antiquity  of  whose  language  loomed  far 
beyond  the  old  Sanskrit  of  even  the  law-book  of  Manu, 
or  of  the  great  Indian  epics.  A  sensation,  as  of  being 
led  back  into  the  deepest  past  of  our  own  Teutonic  an- 
cestors, as  of  catching  faint  traces  of  their  heart-beats 
in  the  first  dawn  of  their  antiquity,  was  quite  generally 
felt,  as  those  gods  of  a  blood-related  people  arose  be- 
fore  us ;  Agni,  fire,  the  genial  guest  of  human  habita- 
tions ;  Indra,  the  thundering  dragon-slayer,  who  uses 
his  boundless  strength  to  free  the  waters  from  their 
prison  ;    Varuna,  in  whom  it  was  believed  the  all-em- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA.  45 

bracing  heavens  were  personified,  the  observer  and 
avenger  of  even  the  most  hidden  sins ;  Ushas,  the 
lovely  morning-blush,  the  dawn,  who  usurps  the  sway 
of  her  sister,  the  night,  and,  with  a  herd  of  ruddy 
cattle  in  her  train  traverses  the  firmament  over,  lavish- 
ing benefits  and  blessings. 

It  so  happened,  in  the  progress  of  science,  that  the 
first  glances,  which  fell  upon  these  apparitions  of  the 
gods,  starting  up  thus  suddenly  from  the  midst  of  a 
desolated  field,  were  the  glances  of  comparative  phi- 
lologists :  the  same  savants,  who,  leaping  from  one 
triumph  to  another,  were  at  that  very  time  engrossed 
with  the  work  of  illuminating  the  Greek,  Latin,  and 
Germanic  inflexions  with  the  light  coming  from  the 
Sanskrit.  What  could  be  more  natural  than  that  those 
investigators  should  apply  to  mythology  the  same  crit- 
ical method  of  comparison  which  had  borne  such  rich 
and  abundant  fruits  in  Grammar?  that  they  should 
seek  to  establish  between  the  divinities  of  the  Veda 
and  those  of  ancient  Europe  the  same  kinship,  the 
same  identity  of  origin,  as  existed  between  certain 
forms  of  Indian  and  Greek  verbs,  for  example  between 
the  Indian  daddmi  and  the  Greek  didotni,  both  of  which 
mean  "  I  give  "?  And  so,  there  grew  up — one  might 
say,  as  a  branch  of  comparative  philology — a  compar- 
ative mythology,  which  uniformly  placed  the  philolo- 
gical points  of  view  foremost ;  and  which  placed  spe- 
cial reliance  upon  the  names  of  the  divinities  or  de- 
mons, and  then  sought  to  establish  their  primal  na- 
tures by  means  of  an  etymological  treatment  of  these 
names. 

In  the  pursuit  of  this  course,  as  between  the  Veda 
and  the  European  traditions,  the  leading  part  fell  nat- 
urally enough  to  the  former.     For  the  Veda  had  the 


46  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

benefit  of  all  that  prestige  which  the  Sanskrit  then 
enjoyed  in  philological  matters,  of  being  the  chiefest 
witness  as  to  what  was  the  first  form  and  the  first 
meaning  of  words.  Why  the  word  daughter  should  be 
thygater  in  Greek  and  Tochter  in  German,  neither  the 
Greek  nor  the  German  language  could  explain.  But 
the  Sanskrit  did  seem  able  to  explain  it.  The  history 
of  the  Sanskrit  word  for  daughter  seemed  written  on 
its  very  front.  Since  this  word  fell  under  the  root  duh 
(to  milk),  it  seemed  obvious  that  the  daughter  was 
originally  the  milker — a  domestic  idyl  from  remotest 
antiquity.  And  at  length  there  was  a  sort  of  conviction, 
trailing  at  the  hand  of  an  etymology  dominated  by  the 
Sanskrit,  that  we  could,  to  repeat  an  expression  of 
Max  Miiller's,  reach  back  into  regions  of  the  past  so 
far  as  to  believe  ourselves  listening  to  the  very  voices 
of  the  earth-born  sons  of  Manu. 

It  was  in  fact  unavoidable,  that  this  scientific  art, 
whilst  pursuing  its  labors  with  such  ardor,  such  rich 
hopes,  such  confidence,  should  at  the  same  time  ex- 
perience within  itself  the  calling  and  the  capacity,  to 
expound,  with  the  help  of  a  catalogue  of  Sanskrit 
roots,  the  primal  meaning  of  the  hitherto  mysterious 
divinities  of  Homer,  of  ancient  Italy,  and  of  the  Edda. 
And  it  must  be  admitted,  too,  that  a  few  of  these  com- 
parisons and  elaborations  of  the  names  of  the  old  di- 
vinities really  forced  themselves  upon  the  mind  with 
overpowering  conviction,  and  remain  at  this  day  as 
convincing  as  they  were  then. 

But  with  the  attempt  to  press  on  beyond  this  very 
scanty  store,  an  approach  was  ever  more  closely  made 
to  a  procedure  the  subjective  character  of  which  seri- 
ously endangered  the  security  of  the  results  already 
acquired.     From  the  endless  wealth  of  mythological 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA.  47 

names,  of  which  the  Veda  is  literally  full,  the  sharp 
scent  of  the  investigators  hunted  out  and  brought  to 
light  here  and  there  a  word,  which,  while  it  may  have 
had  some  small  resemblance  to  a  Greek  name,  still 
occurred  but  rarely  in  the  Vedic  tradition.  Or  if  there 
were  no  proper  noun  for  the  divinity  to  be  found  in 
the  Vedic,  they  would  fasten  upon  a  mere  adjective. 
Or,  indeed,  instead  of  a  word  actually  transmitted  in 
the  Veda,  they  would  now  and  then  upon  their  own 
responsibility  build  up  a  Vedic  word  as  a  counterpart 
to  the  name  of  a  Greek  divinity. 

Thus,  in  a  very  obscure  verse  of  the  Rig- Veda  there 
appears  a  goddess,  a  female  demon,  Saranjus,  of  whose 
nature  the  Veda  reveals  next  to  nothing  at  all ;  it  was 
thought  that  the  primitive*  form  of  the  Greek  Erinys 
had  been  found.  The  name  Saranjus,  according  to  its 
derivation  from  a  root  sar  (to  hurry),  seems  to  mean 
"the  hurrying  one";  and  the  view  was  accordingly 
adopted,  that  she  was  the  personification  of  the  stormy 
thunder- cloud.  And  when  the  Greeks  speak  of  Erinys 
as  "walking  in  the  mist,"  of  her  swinging  torches  in 
her  hands,  immediately  plain  confirmation  was  therein 
discerned  for  the  proposition  that  the  Erinyes,  too, 
sprang  from  the  conception  of  the  thunder-cloud  ;  their 
torches  are  the  thunder-bolts  which  strike  down  the 
impious. 

The  Rig- Veda  speaks  of  a  goddess  Sarama,  a  dog, 


♦  Not  "primitive"  in  the  sense  that  the  Greek  goddess  was  derived  from 
the  Indian,  but  in  the  sense  that  the  Indo-European  prototype,  common  alike 
to  the  Greek  and  the  Indian  form,  in  all  essential  respects  was  correctly 
represented  in  the  Indian  form.  To  properly  appreciate  the  equating  of  the 
names  Saranjus  and  Erinys  (so,  too,  that  of  Saramejas»Hermeias  [Hermes]), 
it  is  to  be  observed  that  the  initial  5  of  Indo-European  words,  which  was  re- 
tained in  Sanskrit  (as  also  in  the  Latin  and  Teutonic),  became  in  the  Greek, 
when  followed  by  a  vowel,  either  a  mere  aspirate  or  disappeared  altogether  ; 
thus  our  tevtn  (Latin,  st^ttm)  in  Greek  ia  written  htpta. 


48  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

who  tracks  the  ruddy  cows  of  the  gods  to  their  con- 
cealment when  stolen ;  her  sons,  who  also  have  canine 
shapes  and  appear  to  play  the  part  of  genii  of  sleep 
and  death,  are  named  after  their  mother  Saramejas. 
It  was  thought  that  the  Greek  Hermes  and  Henneias 
had  been  discovered  here,  the  guide  of  souls  into  the 
realm  of  death,  the  dream-sending  god  of  sleep.  And 
here  again  the  same  root  sar  (to  hurry)  seemed  to  con- 
duct the  mythological  interpreter  into  the  realm  of  the 
agitated  atmosphere,  just  as  in  the  case  of  Erinys. 
Sarama,  "the  hurrying  one,"  was  explained  as  the 
wind  ;  to  the  fleetness  of  the  wind  the  dog-form  of  the 
goddess  and  her  children  seemed  to  correspond,  in  the 
natural  symbolism  of  the  myth. 

But  the  wind  is  not  the  only  thing  in  nature  which 
moves  hurriedly.  And  hence  other  interpretations 
were  possible.  Sarama,  who  recovers  the  treasure  of 
ruddy  cows  lost  in  the  darkness,  could  she  not  mean 
the  morning-blush,  the  dawn?  And  does  not  her  name 
appear  to  resemble  the  name  of  Helena?  In  that  case, 
the  story  of  the  Iliad  is  found  again  in  one  of  the  stand- 
ing themes  of  the  Veda-hymns  ;  the  siege  of  Troy 
would  be  but  a  repetition  of  the  daily  siege  by  the 
martial  forces  of  the  sun,  of  the  entrenchments  of 
night,  where  the  treasures  of  light  are  locked  up. 

Besides  Helen,  there  appeared  in  the  Greek  a 
whole  list  of  goddesses  representing  the  Indian  morn- 
ing, the  foremost  of  which  was  disclosed  in  the  Vedic 
title  of  the  dawn,  Ahana.  Here,  it  was  thought,  lay 
the  germ  from  which  the  Greek  Athene  had  sprung, 
the  daughter  of  Zeus,  just  as  in  the  Veda  the  dawn 
was  called  the  daughter  of  Djaus,  or  Heaven. 

In  conclusion,  one  more  of  these  Indo-Greek  com- 
binations may  be  cited  :  the  one  which  of  them  all 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA.  49 

perhaps  fared  with  the  best  luck.  A  part  of  the  an- 
cient Indian  fire-drill,  namely,  the  stick  which  was 
kept  turning  to  ignite  the  wood  by  its  friction,  was 
called  pramantha.  Here  was  revealed,  so  it  was 
thought,  the  nature  of  the  Titan  form  of  Prometheus. 
The  friend  of  mankind — who  brought  to  them,  de- 
spite of  Zeus,  fire,  the  fountain  of  all  art — seemed 
here  to  be  announced  in  his  original  character  as  a 
divine  "rubber  of  fire,"  who  afterwards  brings  down 
the  flame,  which  he  has  himself  produced,  to  the  earth. 

It  is  evident  that  in  nearly  all  of  these  combina- 
tions one  characteristic  regularly  recurs  :  the  origin  of 
the  divine  beings,  including  those  which  appear  most 
unequivocally  to  represent  ethical  forces  or  influences 
active  in  human  culture,  is  traced  back  to  the  powers 
of  nature.  Erinys  was  the  dark  storm-cloud  before 
she  undertook  the  office  of  avenging  the  misdeeds  of 
men.  But  in  the  great  realm  of  nature  there  were 
two  regions  in  which  these  interpretations  of  the  mean- 
ing of  divinities  and  myths  lingered  with  particular 
predilection  :  the  phenomena  of  storm  and  thunder  on 
the  one  hand,  and  on  the  other  the  alternation  of  light 
and  darkness. 

At  this  point  the  leanings  of  investigators  diverged. 
The  question  was  much  discussed  as  to  which  of  the 
two  classes  must  have  produced  the  deepest  and  most 
lasting  impressions  upon  the  soul  of  youthful  mankind, 
— those  extraordinary,  and,  as  it  were,  convulsive  com- 
motions which  agitate  the  atmosphere,  or  the  calm 
majesty  of  the  divine  powers  of  light,  daily  recurring 
with  uniform  grandeur. 

Adalbert  Kuhn  was  the  first  among  those  investi- 
gators who  peopled  the  mythological  landscape  with 
storm-gods,  cloud-nymphs,  and  demons  of  lightning. 


so  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

He  believed  that  the  language  of  many  myths  was  to 
be  interpreted  as  descriptions  of  meteorological  phe- 
nomena, the  details  of  which — the  various  motions 
of  rising,  departing,  scattering  dark  clouds,  and  of 
brighter  little  clouds — seemed  to  have  been  seized 
and  expatiated  upon  with  painful  exactitude  through 
whole  lists  of  varying  phases.  According  to  Max  Miil- 
ler,  on  the  other  hand,  the  main  theme  of  the  Indo- 
Germanic  myths  found  expression  in  the  words  dawn 
and  sun.  To  his  poetically  attuned  imagination  the 
ancient  poets  and  thinkers  stood  revealed  as  daily  des- 
crying in  what  we  call  sunrise  the  mystery  of  all  mys- 
teries. The  dawn  was  to  them  that  unknown  land 
from  whose  impenetrable  depths  life  ever  newly  flashes 
forth.  The  dawn  opens  to  the  sun  her  golden  gates, 
and  whilst  her  gates  thus  stand  ajar,  eyes  and  hearts 
yearn  and  struggle  to  peer  beyond  the  limits  of  this 
finite  world ;  the  thought  of  the  unending,  the  undy- 
ing, the  divine,  awakens  in  the  human  soul.  But 
whether  storm  or  sunrise,  all  concurred  in  the  view 
that  in  the  Veda  lay  the  guide  which  would  conduct 
us  to  the  theogony  of  the  Indo-European  peoples, — 
that  there  was  here  a  system  of  religion  to  the  last  de- 
gree primal  in  character,  clear  and  transparent,  all  the 
varying  forms  of  which  plainly  took  root  in  the  primi- 
tive views  and  expressions  of  man  upon  the  powers 
and  processes  of  nature.  As  Max  Miiller  put  it,  the 
mythological  sphynx  here  reveals  her  secret ;  we  can 
just  barely  throw  a  glance  behind  the  scenes  upon  the 
forces  whose  play,  upon  Greek  soil,  achieved  that 
splendid  stage-effect,  the  majestic  drama  of  the  Olym- 
pian gods.  A  new  direction  of  inquiry  seemed  to  have 
opened  to  science,  leading  by  undreamt-of  paths  to 
the  farthest  past  in  the  life  of  the  human  soul. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA.  51 

Those  who  first  broke  through  these  paths  must 
indeed  have  been  possessed  to  an  unnatural  degree  by 
indifference  and  suspicion,  had  not  a  kind  of  intoxica- 
tion overwhelmed  them  as  they  confronted  this  pleni- 
tude of  history, — if  they  had  not  experienced  the  hope 
that  in  the  Veda  they  might  with  one  bold  grasp  suc- 
ceed in  seizing  the  origin  of  myths  and  of  very  religion 
herself,  zu  schauen  alle  Wirkenskraft  und  Samen. 

Have  all  these  results — a  lasting  achievement,  as 
it  was  supposed — avoided  the  fate  of  annihilation? 

II. 

An  attack  upon  the  teachings  of  comparative  myth- 
ology, upon  the  belief  in  the  primitive  character  of  the 
world  of  Vedic  gods  and  legends,  was  slowly  prepar- 
ing. It  came,  on  the  one  hand,  from  the  advances 
made  in  philological  investigations,  which  stripped 
one  supposed  certainty  after  another  of  its  plausible 
glitter.  It  came,  on  the  other,  from  a  more  material 
opposition  :  the  speculations,  the  criticisms,  the  dis- 
coveries, of  a  newly  sprouting  but  sturdy  offshoot  of 
science,  ethnology. 

We  shall  inquire  first  how  the  art  of  manipulating 
those  philological  problems  deepened,  upon  which 
pretty  nearly  everything  as  taught  by  comparative 
mythology  depended. 

In  the  comparison  of  Indian  words  with  the  Greek 
or  Germanic  a  tendency  arose  to  be  severer,  more  sus- 
picious, more  deliberate.  And  with  good  reason. 
Greater  circumspection  was  observed  in  applying  a 
principle,  theretofore  too  frequently  neglected,  of  first 
subjecting  the  word — before  undertaking  to  draw  par- 
allels between  it  and  words  of  another  tongue — to  a 
thorough  consideration  within  the  domain  of  its  own 


52  ANCIENT  INDIA, 

language,  and  to  an  examination  of  it  in  all  its  con- 
nexions there,  throughout  the  whole  circle  of  words 
related  to  it.  And  then,  afterward,  when  the  bound- 
aries of  the  several  great  lingual  families  were  crossed 
and  the  attempt  made  to  bridge  over  the  wide  clefts 
between  their  respective  vocabularies  by  means  of 
their  resemblances,  it  was  insisted  upon,  with  a  strin- 
gency unknown  to  the  earlier  period,  that  a  proper  re- 
gard should  be  paid  to  individual  sounds  and  their 
equivalent  individual  sounds  in  the  kindred  languages; 
correspondences  which  about  this  time  began  to  be 
reduced  to  laws  of  a  more  and  more  unerring  charac- 
ter. The  mere  external  resemblance  of  words  was  no 
longer  worth  considering — that  was  something  subjec- 
tive and  only  a  subjective  estimate  could  be  passed 
upon  it.  Now,  the  certain,  unchangeable  conditions 
were  known,  in  obedience  to  which  the  vocal  sounds 
of  the  parent  Indo-European  tongue  have  developed 
into  the  Sanskrit  or  the  Greek  or  the  Teutonic.  Of  all 
the  comparisons  made  between  mythological  names, 
as  alluded  to,  only  a  small  minority  could  pass  an  ex- 
amination so  severe,  but  so  necessary,  as  was  now  ap- 
plied to  them.  In  a  word,  it  is  flatly  impossible  that 
Prometheus  should  be  the  same  word  as  the  Indian 
pramantha ;  nor  can  Helena  be  the  same  as  Sarama, 
for  the  simple  reason  that  the  Greek  «  and  the  Indian 
m  are  not  equivalent. 

And  just  as  it  resulted  in  these  word-comparisons, 
so  too  the  practice,  once  pursued  with  such  confidence, 
of  tracing  words  of  different  languages  to  roots,  which 
were  taken  from  the  capacious  granary  of  Sanskrit 
roots,  proved  more  questionable  in  its  character  the 
longer  it  was  continued.  The  conviction  grew  that 
instead  of  yielding  to  the  dangerous  temptation  to 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA.  53 

read  the  whole  origin  and  history  of  a  word,  or  of  a 
concept,  from  a  few  consonants,  the  coldest  restraint 
ought  more  properly  to  be  exercised  ;  and  that  in  thou- 
sands of  cases  it  was  necessary  to  resignedly  accept  a 
word  as  a  fixed  quantity,  as  the  proper  name  of  such 
and  such  a  mythological  being,  without  endeavoring 
to  practise  that  dangerous  art  upon  it  of  detecting 
only  too  easily  and  everywhere  a  sunrise  or  a  storm- 
cloud.  In  a  word  :  it  grew  daily  more  evident  that  an 
endeavor  had  been  made  to  learn  too  quickly,  too 
much  from  words,  and  that  it  was  high  time  to  exam- 
ine things  instead  of  words,  to  explore  with  greater 
patience,  less  prejudice,  the  great  concrete  world  of 
religious  and  mythological  ideas,  instead  of  guessing 
about  them  and  in  reliance  upon  doubtful  etymologies 
imposing  upon  them  a  meaning  which  really  and  at 
bottom  originated  in  the  close  atmosphere  of  the  li- 
brary. 

But  let  no  misunderstanding  arise.  It  is  by  no 
means  my  purpose  to  maintain  that  it  was  not  a  justi- 
fiable effort  on  the  part  of  investigation,  to  get  at  the 
common  inheritance  from  the  pre-historic  Indo-Euro- 
pean ages,  by  a  comparison  of  the  Indian,  Greek,  and 
German  gods  and  legends,  and  thus,  if  possible,  to 
enable  the  ideas  of  the  respective  peoples  to  mutually 
clear  up  and  illumine  both  their  source  and  their  bear- 
ing. Experience  alone  can  tell  what  success  is  to  be 
attained  in  this  way.  But  the  measure  of  that  success 
— though  by  no  means  wholly  negative — has  thus  far 
justified  but  very  modest  expectations,  if  we  consider 
such  hasty  results  of  this  period  as  that  by  which  Pro- 
metheus  and  pratnantha  were  regarded  equivalent. 

In  this  direction,  investigation  achieved  results  al- 
most as  barren  as  its  purely  philological  fruits  were 


54  ANCIENT  INDIA, 

abundant.  As  to  the  latter,  it  has  in  the  main  restored 
the  paradigms  of  the  Indo-Germanic  language  by  the 
comparison  of  Indian,  Greek,  Latin,  Germanic,  and 
Slavic  declensions  and  conjugations,  and  in  the  same 
way  gotten  at  the  processes  by  which  the  parent  para- 
digms became  transmuted  into  the  paradigms  of  the 
filial  tongues  ;  and  it  has  accomplished  this  with  evi- 
dences of  growing  confidence,  since  its  successes  all 
the  while  steadily  augmented  in  volume — and  this  is 
the  surest  proof  that  the  course  pursued  has  been  the 
correct  one. 

The  reason  is  manifest.  The  variations  in  forms, 
of  grammatical  systems,  are  the  product  of  factors  re- 
latively simple,  which,  for  the  most  part,  can  be  ex- 
pressed in  formulae  of  almost  mathematical  certainty. 
In  mythological  history,  on  the  contrary,  a  throng  of 
varying  influences  are  all  at  once  in  play,  so  complex 
and  so  involved  that  the  glance  in  vain  may  seek  to 
comprehend  them  all  at  once.  A  certain  group  of  ideas 
at  one  time  fades  away  and  disappears,  anon  they  col- 
lect again,  gather  closely,  and  again  assume  a  definite 
concrete  form.  Elements,  once  widely  separated,  later 
on  meet  and  form  new  combinations,  which,  in  their 
turn,  in  the  endeavor  to  assume  a  finished  form,  or  to 
maintain  themselves  at  all,  are  compelled  to  give  forth 
new  ideas,  offshoots  of  themselves.  Mental  processes, 
which  are  unconsciously  conducted,  intersect  with  con- 
scious cerebrations  of  primitive  poesy  and  specula- 
tion, the  motives  of  which  frequently  are  far  removed 
and  accessible  only  with  great  difficulty  to  modern 
habits  of  thought.  And  finally  external  interests,  too, 
play  their  part :  emulations  of  every  kind,  the  struggle 
for  property  or  position,  vanity,  and  no  end  of  other 
impulses  of  a  similar  character.  And  this  chaotic  con- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA.  55 

fusion  is  lit  up  but  sparsely,  in  spots,  by  the  murky 
light  of  tradition,  and  with  this  light,  only,  science  has 
to  work.  Between  these  dimly  lighted  spots  are  bound- 
less expanses  lying  in  deepest  gloom ;  so  that  when 
the  thread  once  slips  from  the  hand  of  the  investigator, 
he  is  greatly  in  danger  of  losing  himself  altogether. 

It  is  therefore  easy  to  comprehend  that  the  attempt 
to  bridge  over  the  vast  distance  between  India  on  the 
one  hand,  and  Greece  or  the  Teutonic  world  on  the 
other,  has  infinitely  poorer  chances  of  success  in  things 
pertaining  to  religions  and  legend  than  in  the  case  of 
mere  inflexions.  Still,  when  all  is  said,  there  is  no 
lack  of  specific  instances  where  this  comparison  of 
Indian  and  European  divinities  has  succeeded  in  spite 
of  the  difficulties  presented.  The  twins  Asvin,  literally 
"the  horsemen,"  those  radiant  young  divinities,  who 
speed  across  the  vault  of  heaven  at  early  morn  with 
their  fleet  chariot  and  to  the  oppressed  appear  as  de- 
liverers from  every  kind  of  suffering,  certainly  corre- 
spond— of  this  I  am  firmly  convinced — to  the  Greek 
Dioskuroi,  as  well  as  afford  assistance  in  getting  at  the 
nature  of  the  Dioskuroi.  Indra,  the  strongest  of  the 
Vedic  divinities,  who,  hurling  his  weapon,  slays  the 
dragon  and  liberates  the  imprisoned  waters,  is  truly 
the  same  god  as  Thor  in  the  Edda,  the  dragon-fighter, 
the  hammer-hurler.^  Both  in  India  and  in  the  Teutonic 


iNote  that  both  in  the  comparison  Indra=Thor,  as  well  as  in  that  of 
Asvin=Dioskuroi,  the  names  fail  philologically  to  agree.  As  remarked  be. 
fore,  the  attempt  has  been  made  to  draw  a  parallel  between  the  Greek  Hermes 
and  the  Indian  dog-divinity  Sarameyas.  Hermes  really  belongs,  with  greater 
show  of  reason,  to  a  classification  with  the  Vedic  god  Pushan,  who,  like 
Hermes,  rules  as  protector  over  roads  and  travellers,  like  him  is  the  messen- 
ger of  the  gods,  and  acts  as  escort  of  souls  into  the  future  life,  and  like  Hermes 
protects  herds  and  reveals  lucky  treasures.  The  juxtaposition  of  the  material 
qualities  of  ideas  thus  leads  to  results  absolutely  independent  of  any  assis- 
tance to  be  gotten  from  the  etymological  comparison  of  names. 


56  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

north  the  storm-god  of  the  Indo-Europeans  has  pre- 
served a  uniformity  of  nature  which  is  at  once  recog- 
nisable. But,  to  repeat,  the  stock  of  such  compari- 
sons which  can  safely  be  maintained,  is  a  very  modest 
one,  and  we  hardly  have  reason  to  form  hopes  of  ob- 
taining greater  successes  of  this  sort  in  the  future  than 
we  have  obtained  in  the  past. 

III. 

More  decisive  than  the  reformation  accomplished 
within  philology  itself,  the  course  of  which  we  traced 
in  the  last  section,  was  the  influence  on  Vedic  research 
of  a  new  class  of  inquiries,  which  were  far  removed  from 
the  domain  of  comparative  philology  and  of  Sanskrit, 
and  which  tended  to  overthrow  altogether  the  belief 
that  the  Veda  was  the  representative  type  of  every 
primitive  religion  and  mythology.  We  refer  to  the 
researches  of  the  comparative  ethnologists  who  were 
now  making  a  highly  comprehensive  and  systematic 
study  of  the  elusive  forms  which  the  religious  senti- 
ment, the  cult,  the  myth-creating  phantasy  of  modern 
peoples  assumed  in  the  lower  and  the  lowest  stages  of 
civilisation. 

And  here  a  discovery  of  the  utmost  import  was 
made,  the  honors  of  which  belong  first  of  all  to  Eng- 
lish investigators  such  as  Tylor  and  Lang,  and  along 
with  them  to  an  excellent  German  scholar,  Wilhelm 
Mannhardt.  It  was  found  that,  very  much  like  their 
weapons  and  utensils,  so  too  the  religion  of  the  lowest 
orders  of  man,  the  whole  world  over,  was  everywhere 
one  and  the  same  in  its  essential  elements.  By  some 
intrinsic  necessity,  there  is  always  imposed  upon  this 
low  state  of  evolution  just  this  particular  type  of  ideas 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA.  57 

and  customs,  which  is  the  normal  one,  and  as  such 
may  be  looked  for  with  absolute  certainty. 

This  type  of  belief  and  cult,  which  is  only  faintly 
idealistic,  and  is  dominated  by  thoroughly  harsh  and 
practical  views,  we  shall  describe  at  some  length  far- 
ther on.  At  this  point  we  have  simply  to  remark  upon 
the  evident  conclusion  to  be  drawn  from  these  obser- 
vations, that  the  ancestors,  also  of  those  peoples,  which 
we  meet  with  in  historic  times  as  the  possessors  of 
most  opulent  civilisations,  must,  in  some  prehistoric 
age,  however  remote,  have  gone  through  just  such  a 
savage  period  of  religious  and  ritualistic  development. 

This  fact  established,  there  was  at  once  opened  to 
scholars  who  did  not  deem  it  beneath  them  to  learn 
something  from  American  Indians,  negroes,  and  Aus- 
tralians, a  source  of  highly  important  data  drawn  di- 
rectly from  the  mouths  of  living  witnesses,  by  which 
it  was  possible  to  reveal  prehistoric  epochs  antedating 
even  the  Homeric  or  Vedic  religions,  and  preparatory 
to  them.  Reasoning  from  the  ideas  of  modern  savages, 
to  the  ideas  obtaining  in  the  prehistoric  savage  state 
of  subsequently  civilised  peoples,  may  have  seemed  a 
hazardous  undertaking ;  but  there  was  a  sure  correc- 
tive for  the  procedure.  It  is  well-known  that  in  all 
transitions  of  lower  civilisations  to  higher,  many  ele- 
ments of  the  old  condition  persist  and  hold  over  in  the 
new,  and  that  the  spirit  of  the  new  can  neither  destroy 
nor  assimilate  them.  They  persist  as  survivals  of  the 
past  in  the  midst  of  altered  surroundings,  and  are  ab- 
solutely unintelligible  to  people  who  know  only  the 
tendency  and  ways  of  the  new  period ;  they  can  be 
explained  only  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  time  in 
which  they  originated — a  time  when  they  were  active 


58  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

principles, — a  time,  the  tracks  of  which  they  preserve, 
as  it  were,  in  a  fossil  condition. 

Now  if  our  view  is  correct,  such  survivals  must  be 
found  at  every  step  in  a  mythology  and  a  cult  like  the 
Veda — and,  we  might  likewise  say,  in  the  mythology 
and  cult  of  Homer ;  they  must  be  the  special  lurking- 
places  of  whatever  appears  to  be  irrational,  odd,  self- 
contradictory,  and  difficult  of  exposition.  But,  on  the 
other  hand,  whatever  in  those  poems  seems  incompre- 
hensible to  the  man  of  to-day  must  become  intelligible 
as  soon  as  the  art  is  acquired  of  looking  at  it  from  the 
standpoint  of  the  modern  savage  and  with  the  help  of 
his  peculiar  logic,  both  of  which  are  often  totally  dis- 
tinct from  ours. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  moment  a  search  was  made 
through  the  ancient  Indian  and  the  related  European 
civilisations  for  such  remains  of  prehistoric  and  an- 
ticipatory culture,  the  conviction  forced  itself  irresist- 
ibly on  scholars  that  the  correct  method  had  at  last  been 
discovered.  Problems  quickly  resolved  themselves, 
which  theretofore  dared  scarcely  be  approached.  The 
most  striking  agreements  were  disclosed  between  the 
various  types  of  myth  and  cult  scattered  at  this  very 
day  over  the  earth  among  our  savages  and  barbarians, 
and  the  type  of  myth  and  cult  which  had  lain  imbedded 
in  the  Veda  as  a  mass  of  unintelligible  facts,  wholly  ir- 
reconcilable with  any  interpretation  derived  from  the 
known  intellectual  character  of  the  Vedic  world. 

The  chain  of  proof  was  thus  rendered  continuous 
and  conclusive.  Science  had  succeeded  (or  at  least 
was  steadily  advancing  toward  success) — not  by  means 
of  bare  grammatical  speculations  or  the  study  of  San- 
skrit roots,  but  by  inquiries  which  rested  at  every  point 
upon  a  basis  of  living  fact — in  showing  that  there  was 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA.  59 

a  certain  elementary  state  at  the  beginning  of  all  civil- 
isations and  in  disclosing  the  gray,  early  dawn  anticipa- 
tory of  the  broad  daylight  of  their  history.  This  was  a 
revelation,  which — however  gradually  and  modestly  it 
asserted  itself — is  perhaps  of  even  farther-reaching  im- 
portance in  the  exploration  of  antiquity  than  those 
brilliant  exploits  of  the  philologist's  finished  art  which 
has  opened  the  way  to  the  remote  recesses  of  Egyptian 
and  Babylonian  civilisation. 

As  a  result  of  this  discovery,  a  place  was  given  to 
the  religion  and  mythology  of  the  Veda  widely  differ- 
ent from  that  which  the  enthusiasm  of  its  earlier  stu- 
dents had  sought  to  assign  to  them.  The  assumption 
that  the  Veda  revealed  the  secret  of  the  elementary 
formative  processes  of  creed  and  cult,  was  thus  shown 
to  be  as  far  wide  of  the  mark,  as  it  would  have  been 
to  have  considered  the  grammar  of  the  Sanskrit,  the 
complexity  of  which  points  to  an  infinitely  long  prep- 
aratory history,  as  the  elemental  grammar  of  human 
speech.  The  fact  is,  it  is  not  true,  as  the  supposition 
had  been  up  to  that  time,  that  the  myth-building  phan- 
tasy of  man  is  revealed  in  its  natural  processes  in  the 
Veda,  as  plainly  as  a  clock  housed  in  glass  reveals  all 
its  wheels  and  works.  The  Vedic  divinities,  the  Vedic 
sacrifices,  are  not  primitive  and  transparent  products 
of  the  original  creative  force  of  religion,  but  for  the 
most  part  turn  out,  on  close  scrutinisation,  to  be  an- 
cient, obscure,  and  complex  creations. 

We  shall  next  attempt  a  description  of  the  age  pre- 
ceding the  Vedic  religion,  and  also  of  that  religion 
itself,  as  both  appear  from  the  point  of  view  here 
sketched.  * 

*  I  haT«  given  this  subjact  a  more  detailed  treatment  in  xa-j  boolc  Tht  R*- 
ligion  o/tht  Vtda.    (1894.) 


6o  ANCIENT  INDIA. 


IV. 

The  fundamental  nature  of  the  primary  Indian  re- 
ligion, surviving  from  the  very  remotest  antiquity  and 
rising  to  the  surface  of  the  Vedic  times  as  a  more  or 
less  ruinous  wreckage,  is,  as  we  have  seen,  essentially 
that  of  the  savage's  religion.  According  to  this,  all 
existence  appears  animated  with  spirits,  whose  con- 
fused masses  crowd  upon  each  other,  buzzing,  flock- 
ing, swarming  along  with  the  phantom  souls  of  the 
dead,  and  act,  each  according  to  its  nature,  in  every 
occurrence.  If  a  human  being  fall  ill,  it  is  a  spirit 
that  has  taken  possession  of  him  and  imposes  upon 
him  his  ills.  The  patient  is  cured  by  enticing  the  spirit 
from  him  with  magic.  A  spirit  dwells  in  the  flying 
arrow.  He  who  shoots  off  an  arrow  performs  a  bit  of 
magic  which  puts  this  spirit  into  action.  The  spirits 
have  sometimes  human,  sometimes  animal  form. 
Neither  form  is  nobler  or  lower  than  the  other,  for  as 
yet  no  distinction  between  the  human  and  bestial  na- 
ture has  been  made.  In  fact,  man  is  usually  looked 
upon  as  descended  from  the  animal;  the  tribes  of  men 
are  called  bears,  wolves,  snakes,  and  the  individuals 
of  the  animal  genus  after  which  they  are  thus  called 
are  treated  by  the  tribes  as  their  blood-relations. 

As  they  move  hither  and  thither,  the  spirits  may 
select  a  domicile,  abiding  or  temporary,  in  some  vis- 
ible object.  A  feather,  or  a  bone,  or  a  stone  at  differ- 
ent times  holds  the  spirit ;  and  anon  the  spirit  steals 
into  a  human  being  whom  it  makes  ill,  or  throws  into 
convulsions  in  which  supernatural  visions  come  to 
him  and  in  which  the  spirit  talks  through  him  in  con- 
fused phrases. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA.  6i 

And  just  as  man  at  this  stage  of  development  lives 
only  for  the  moment,  thrown  unresistingly  to  and  fro 
by  all  sorts  of  vacillatory  influences,  such  naturally  is 
the  way  of  the  spirits.  The  spirits  of  savages  are 
themselves  savages,  greedy,  superstitious,  easily  ex- 
citable. The  man  of  skill,  the  magician,  who  as  yet 
occupies  the  place  filled  at  a  later  period  by  the  priest, 
knows  the  art — first  anticipatory  hints  of  a  cult — of 
flattering  the  spirits ;  he  understands  how  to  bar  their 
passage,  to  terrify  them,  to  deceive  them,  to  compel 
them,  to  provoke  them  against  his  enemy.  They  are 
washed  away  with  water  ;  they  are  consumed  by  fire ; 
even  the  friendly  spirits,  whenever  they  prove  themselves 
intractable,  are  subjected  to  the  same  sort  of  irreverent 
treatment.  It  is  apparent  that  this  religion  knows  of 
nothing  possessing  a  majesty  which  at  all  rises  above 
the  level  of  human  life.  An  appreciation,  an  estimate 
of  differences  of  magnitude  and  of  degree  have  not  as 
yet  been  formed.  Animal,  man,  spirit,  are  mixed  up 
together,  all  more  or  less  equal  in  their  power  and  in 
their  rights. 

But  gradually  the  chaos  of  these  ideas  clarifies. 
The  great  begins  to  separate  itself  from  the  little,  the 
noble  from  the  base.  A  calmer  survey  of  the  world 
obtains. 

And  so,  out  of  all  the  confusion  of  forces  working  in 
the  shape  of  spirits,  the  great  powers  of  nature  more 
and  more  emerge  and  assume  the  first  position.  Their 
action,  reaching  far  beyond  human  control  into  the 
farthest  regions  of  space,  the  same  to-day  as  yesterday 
and  to-morrow  as  to-day,  invincible  to  all  human  op- 
position, is  ever  more  felt  to  be  decisive  of  destinies; 
— the  more  so,  as  the  various  branches  of  human  in- 
dustry (cattle  breeding  and  agriculture)  make  improve- 


6a  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

ment  and  hence  intensify  man's  sensitiveness  to  the 
favorable  and  unfavorable  phenomena  of  nature.  It  is, 
therefore,  the  normal  characteristic  of  vast  stretches 
of  historical  development  that  the  great  powers  of 
nature,  such  as  the  heavens,  sun,  moon,  storm,  thun- 
der, and  with  these  the  terrestrial  element  of  fire  and 
the  earth  itself  (usually  first  in  importance  in  this 
class),  appear  as  the  highc'st  givers  of  blessings  and 
rulers  of  all  that  happens.  They  are  superior  to  man 
and  are  at  a  distance  from  him,  as  befits  divinity.  For 
the  embodiment  of  them  into  a  living  personification, 
the  more  perfect  form  of  man  steadily  secures  the  pref- 
erence over  that  of  the  brute.  It  was  only  possible 
to  deify  the  torpid  brute  so  long  as  man  failed  to  feel 
himself  as  something  better  than  the  brute. 

Of  course  the  animal  figure  does  not  disappear  ab- 
solutely and  at  a  single  blow  from  the  midst  of  the 
divinities.  Subordinate  divinities,  standing  in  the 
background  and  thus  remaining  untouched  by  the 
ennobling  tendencies,  were  allowed  to  retain  their  old 
animal  form.  Or,  an  animal,  which  was  once  itself  a 
god,  might,  after  the  god  had  been  exalted  to  the  dig- 
nity of  human  form,  remain  to  the  latter  as  a  special 
attribute,  as  a  sort  of  celestial  domestic  animal, — as, 
for  illustration,  demons  which  were  once  of  the  shape 
of  horses,  being  raised  to  gods  with  the  shape  of  man, 
would  thereafter  appear  as  riding  upon  celestial  horses. 
Or,  some  part  of  the  body  of  the  original  animal  form 
might  be  retained  as  a  part  of  the  newer  human  form 
of  the  god;  or  something  emblematic  of  the  animal  be 
affixed  externally  in  some  way,  and  thus  retain  a  trace 
of  the  old  conception  which  had  been  overthrown. 
And  wherever  a  plastic  art  has  developed  established 
forms,  as  in  Egypt  or  in  Mexico,  and  is  consequently 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA.  63 

strongly  conservative  in  retaining  venerable  traditions, 
the  animal-gods,  cut  in  stone,  may  expect  to  maintain 
themselves  for  a  longer  time  than  they  could  wher- 
ever, as  was  the  case  in  India  in  the  time  of  the  Veda, 
they  lived  in  the  airy  realm  of  the  imagination. 

In  the  same  manner,  the  practice  of  considering 
stone  and  wood  as  fetishes  embodying  the  spirits, 
while  not  disappearing  suddenly  and  wholly,  yet  un- 
avoidably withdraws  from  the  foreground.  The  spook- 
ish,  magical  conception  of  spirits  slipping  stealthily 
from  one  home  to  another  in  matter  of  every  shape 
and  kind  loses  ground.  The  figures  of  the  divinities 
obtain  surer  forms,  each  with  peculiar  outlines  of  its 
own,  and  their  dignity,  at  once  human  and  super- 
natural, is  firmly  established.  Though  far  from  ap- 
proaching to  that  ideal  of  sanctity  to  which  a  later 
age  will  attain ;  though  they  are  still  animated  by 
egotism,  passions,  caprices  of  every  sort, — yet,  ac- 
companying it  all,  a  certain  amount  of  constancy  be- 
comes manifest  in  them,  and  in  all  their  doings  there 
is  evident  the  steady  growth  of  connected  deliberation 
and  plan.  Very  often  the  tendency  develops  of  trans- 
fering  to  these  divinities  the  role  of  kindly  dispensers 
of  bounties,  while,  on  the  other  hand,  the  occupation 
of  doing  injury,  of  causing  illness  and  harm  of  every 
sort,  is  still  allotted  to  inferior  demons,  gnomes,  goblin 
spirits,  which  in  their  essentials  keep  on  a  level  with 
sorcery  of  the  earlier  religion  and  against  which  the 
old  arts  of  spell  and  exorcism  are  effective, — arts, 
which,  be  it  observed,  are  of  no  avail  against  the 
higher  power  of  the  new  great  divinities. 

The  intercourse  of  man  with  these  new  gods  at- 
tunes itself  to  another  key.  He  is  studious  to  gratify 
the   immortals,   powerful   beings,   willingly  inclining 


«4  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

themselves  to  favor,  when  approached  with  gifts.  He 
invites  them  to  food  and  drink  and  they  yield  to  his 
solicitation  ;  not,  however,  with  the  bluster  and  din 
of  the  spirits  exorcised  by  the  old  sorcerers,  but  in 
calm  grandeur  the  invisible  gods  approach  their  ador- 
ers. The  distinctive  seal,  now  stamped  upon  cult,  is 
henoeforth,  and  for  long  periods  of  time,  sacrifice  and 
prayer. 

It  is  at  this  point  that  it  becomes  clear  what  the 
proper  position  of  the  Vedic  religious  belief  is.  Not 
all  perhaps,  but  yet  all  the  chief  and  dominant  of  the 
Vedic  divinities  are  based  upon  a  personification  of 
natural  forces,  in  forms  of  superhuman  magnitude. 
The  dwelling-place  of  the  most  of  them  is  the  atmos- 
phere or  the  heavens.  The  word  devas  (the  god), 
which  the  Indians  had  received  from  the  Indo-Ger- 
manic  past  and  which  is  to  be  found  among  many  of 
the  related  branches  of  the  family,*  meant  originally 
"the  heavenly  one."  And  thus  the  belief,  which  ele- 
vates the  divinities  above  human  kind  to  a  heavenly 
height,  was  firmly  fixed  and  long  antedates  the  times 
of  the  Veda. 

From  it  all,  we  see  at  the  first  glance  that  with  the 
Veda  we  are  dealing  with  a  stage  of  development  which 
must  have  been  preceded  by  a  long  prior  history.  And 
we  find  a  confirmation  for  such  a  view,  which,  as  was 
explained  above,  might  be  expected  in  a  case  of  this 
kind :  the  types  of  divinities,  or  rather  of  spirits,  char- 
acteristic of  more  primitive  stages  of  development,  are 
profusely  apparent  throughout  the  world  of  Vedic  di- 
vinities.   The  divinities  themselves — heavenly  human 


•Thus,  Latin:  divus,  deus.  Ancient  Gallic:  devo-,  divo-.  Lithuanian: 
divas.  Old  Prussian:  deiwas.  Ancient  Norse  (in  which,  according  to  rules 
of  consonantalchange,  t  instead  of  d  appears) :  tlvar,  the  gods 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA.  65 

beings,  exalted  to  a  colossal  magnitude,  in  agreement 
with  the  general  religious  thought  of  the  Vedic  age — 
retain  numerous,  not  wholly  obliterated,  marks  of  their 
ancient  animal  form.  Demons  of  animal  shape,  like 
"the  serpent  from  the  earth,"  "the  one-footed  goat," 
surround  the  world  of  man-resembling  divinities,  and 
form  a  back-ground  for  them.  And  the  gods  them- 
selves are,  in  certain  rites, — although  exceptionally,  as 
may  be  imagined, — represented  fetish-like  as  embod- 
ied in  animals,  sometimes  too  in  inanimate  objects. 
A  steed  represents  Agni,  the  fleet  god  of  fire  ;  an  ox, 
Indra,  who  is  strong  as  one. 

Further,  there  are  plain  relics  visible  in  the  Veda 
of  the  belief  so  characteristic  of  the  savage  races  :  the 
belief  in  the  blood-relationship  between  certain  human 
families  and  certain  animal  species. 

Again,  in  India  as  elsewhere,  there  appear  along 
with  the  grand  divinities,  which  are  mainly  beneficent 
and  are  raised  by  the  advance  of  thought  to  purer 
forms,  those  spirits  by  which  the  savage  imagines  he 
is  encircled.  They  are  those  cobolds,  malicious  sprites, 
spirits  of  illness,  which  we  may  say  belong  to  the 
Stone  Age  of  religion,  which  are  obdurate  to  any  his- 
torical growth,  and  yet  are  found  with  the  same  char- 
acteristics among  all  peoples  ;  gliding  about  in  human 
and  animal  forms  and  misshapes — by  day  and  by  night, 
but  especially  night — everywhere,  but  with  a  marked 
partiality  for  cross-roads,  grave-yards,  and  other  such 
dismal  places  ;  stealing  into  man,  cheating  him,  con- 
fusing his  mind,  gnawing  at  his  flesh,  sucking  up  his 
blood,  waylaying  his  women,  drinking  up  the  milk  of  his 
cows.  And  finally,  along  with  these  spirits,  and  charac- 
teristic of  the  same  primitive  notions,  there  appear,  in 
the  belief  of  the  Veda,  the  souls  of  the  dead, — those  of 


fl6  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

ancestors  kindly  watching  over  the  destinies  of  their 
children, — and  treacherous,  inimical  souls  :  a  domain 
in  which  the  Veda  has  retained  in  especial  abundance, 
and  scarcely  concealed  beneath  the  veil  spread  over 
them  by  its  advanced  ideas,  the  remains  of  a  savage 
and  most  crude  religious  life. 

If  we  turn,  now,  from  these  survivals  of  a  distant 
past,  to  the  great  divinities,  which  are  characteristic- 
ally the  figure-heads  of  the  religion  of  the  Veda,  we 
shall  find  that  the  stage  at  which  the  work  of  deifying 
the  powers  of  the  air  and  of  the  heavens  is  usually  ac- 
complished, has  been  quite  appreciably  passed.  While 
these  divinities,  too,  have  sprung  from  early  ideas  of 
nature,  the  roots  which  they  there  struck  have  with- 
ered or  are  at  least  touched  with  incipient  decay  ;  the 
original  meaning  taken  from  nature  is  either  forgotten 
or  misunderstood.  The  mightiest  of  the  Vedic  gods, 
Indra,  was  once  the  thunderer,  who  batters  open  the 
cloud-cliffs  with  his  weapon  of  lightning  and  frees  the 
torrents  of  rain  ; — in  the  hymns  of  the  Veda  he  has 
faded  into  the  very  different  figure  of  the  divine  hero, 
physically  strongest  of  the  gods,  the  conferrer  of  vic- 
tories, he  who  performs  all  the  most  powerful  feats  and 
lavishes  inexhaustible  treasures.  The  Vedic  poets  do, 
indeed,  tell  that  legend  of  Indra,  which  was  once  the 
legend  of  the  thunder,  of  the  slaying  of  the  serpent 
and  the  opening  of  the  cliff ;  but  in  their  recital  it  is 
all  distorted.  The  cliff,  which  Indra's  weapon  splits, 
is  no  longer  the  cloud,  but  a  literal  terrestrial  cliff ; 
and  the  rivers  which  he  releases  are  actual  terrestrial 
rivers.  The  conception  of  thunder  has  thus  wholly 
disappeared  from  the  myth  of  Indra  and  there  has 
only  remained  the  story  that  the  strongest  of  the  gods 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA.  67 

had  split  a  wall  of  rock  with  his  marvellous  weapon 
and  that  the  streams  had  poured  forth  from  it. 

The  same  process  of  fading  out  has  befallen  a  num- 
ber of  other  of  these  great  natural  divinities.  The  two 
Asvin,  the  Dioskuroi  of  the  Greeks,  have  lost  their 
meaning  of  morning  and  evening  star.  In  the  Vedic 
creed  their  essential  characteristic  is  that  they  are  the 
deliverers  of  the  oppressed  from  all  kinds  of  suffering. 
Varuna,  in  his  original  character  a  lunar  divinity,  was 
transformed  into  that  of  a  heavenly  king,  the  observer 
and  punisher  of  all  sins  ;  and  the  single  characteristic, 
that  he  is  the  divine  ruler  of  the  night,  alone  shows 
an  obscure  mark  of  his  long-forgotten  real  nature. 

In  this  way  the  deified  forces  of  nature  were  trans- 
muted into  immortal  masters,  and  protectors  of  the 
different  conditions  and  interests  of  human  life.  The 
process  is  readily  comprehended.  The  lively  feeling 
of  owing  everything  good  to  the  powers  of  nature,  in 
itself  no  mean  advance  upon  the  earlier  crude  concep- 
tions, unavoidably  dulls  with  time.  The  growing  co- 
hesion and  order  of  society,  the  more  extensive  char- 
acter of  all  the  enterprises  of  peace  and  war  at  this 
stage,  allows  new  trains  of  ideas  to  press  to  the  front. 
The  power  of  the  king  and  war-hero  now  forces  itself 
upon  the  attention  as  decisive  of  destiny  ;  and  accord- 
ingly in  those  divinities  who  personified  nature  in  the 
forms  of  preternatural  men,  the  element  of  nature  re- 
cedes more  and  more  before  the  element  derived  from 
man.  The  suggestion  of  the  morning  star,  or  of  the 
moon,  pales  before  the  stronger  consciousness  of  being 
under  the  merciful  protection  or  the  corrective  power 
of  heroic  and  royal  divine  masters. 

These  divine  lords,  as  they  are  pictured  in  the 
Veda,  all  possess  strong  family  resemblances.     They 


68  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

are  all  very  powerful,  very  glorious,  very  wise,  very 
ready  in  aid.  They  all  stand  out  in  uniformly  Ti- 
tanic stature,  each  one  like  his  fellows,  but  poor  in  the 
possession  of  that  matchless  beauty  in  which  the  Greek 
saw  his  gods  standing  glorious  before  him.  Zeus  knits 
his  dark  brows,  his  ambrosial  locks  tumble  forwards, 
and  the  Olympic  heights  tremble  ;  the  barbaric  god  of 
the  Veda  *' whets  his  horns  and  shakes  them  power- 
fully like  a  bull,"  the  same  sort  of  expression  as  that 
with  which  an  early  Chaldaic  hymn,  standing  at  about 
the  same  point  of  evolution,  says  of  its  god,  "that  he 
lifts  his  horns  like  a  wild  bull. "  As  yet,  religious  thought 
and  feeling  have  not  advanced  the  idea  of  divinity 
from  the  point  of  grandeur  to  that  of  infinity,  from 
power  to  omnipotency,  and  have  not  in  particular 
taken  the  step  from  multiplicity  to  unity. 

A  single  God  is  created  by  a  history  like  that  of  the 
Old  Testament,  which,  in  the  stress  of  great  national 
experiences,  in  triumph  and  in  defeat,  so  intimately 
binds  a  people  with  the  divinity  that  controls  its  des- 
tiny, that  beside  it  all  other  gods  disappear.  Or,  a 
single  God  may  be  created  by  reflexion  seeking  over 
and  beyond  the  heights  and  depths  of  existence  the 
one  loftiest  height  or  the  one  inmost  germ  of  all  things. 
The  former  is  the  god  of  heroes  and  patriots  ;  the 
latter  the  still,  calm  divinity  of  the  solitary  speculator. 
But  the  bards  of  the  Veda  were  neither  patriots  nor 
philosophers.  The  peace  and  comfortable  existence 
of  ancient  India,  the  dispassionate  character  of  the 
popular  soul,  to  which  a  deep  and  intense  attachment 
to  its  own  national  existence  remained  unknown,  were 
but  rarely  disturbed  by  national  misfortunes  or  pas- 
sions such  as  those  with  which  the  history  of  Israel  is 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA.  69 

filled.*  And  that  impulse  of  philosophical  reflexion 
toward  unity  in  the  confusion  of  phenomena  is  as  yet 
foreign  to  the  age  whose  religious  beliefs  we  are  here 
describing.  Such  an  impulse  does  not  begin  to  show 
itself  until  the  time  of  some  of  the  latest  poems  of  the 
Rig-veda,  then,  however,  growing  in  the  succeeding 
era  to  irresistible  strength. 

The  same  multiplicity  of  gods,  therefore,  prevails 
in  the  Veda  as  of  old — not  the  clean-cut  result  of  a 
methodical  partition,  so  to  speak,  of  the  administra- 
tive offices  of  the  world's  affairs  among  divine  officials, 
but  the  complex  product  of  manifold  historical  pro- 

•To  appreciate  thoroughly  the  difference  in  the  whole  tone  of  historical 
and  religious  sentiment  in  the  Veda  and  in  the  Old  Testament,  compare  two 
songs  which  in  a  measure  occupy  corresponding  positions  in  the  two  litera- 
tures— the  Song  of  the  Victory  of  King  Suda  (Rig-veda,  7, 18)  and  the  Triumphal 
Song  of  Deborah  (Judges,  v).  Both  belong  to  the  earliest  poetical  monuments 
— are  possibly  the  oldest — of  the  nation  from  which  they  emanate.  Both 
glorify  hardly-won  victories ;  the  details  of  the  two  battles  bear  great  resem- 
blance to  each  other,  so  far  as  may  be  judged  from  the  vacillating  floods  of 
the  two  hymns  of  victory.  In  each  a  swollen  stream  brought  destruction  to 
the  foe. 

But  how  differently  does  the  song  of  the  heroic-souled  Jewish  patriotess 
resound  from  that  of  the  Brahmanic  court-priest  and  poet.  In  the  former, 
every  word  glows  with  passion,  with  a  drunken  joy  of  victory.  Every  whit  of 
its  energy  is  strained  for  the  fight,  the  people  staked  its  very  soul  upon  the 
issue,  lehovah  marched  forth  and  all  nature  joined  in  the  combat;  the 
clouds  deluged  the  earth  with  waters  ;  the  stars  in  their  courses  contended 
against  Sisera.  We  see  the  hostile  leader  collapse  before  the  shepherd  wo- 
man, who  gave  him  milk  when  he  asked  for  water,  and  struck  him  down  with 
her  hammer.  We  see  his  mother  gazing  after  him  and  moaning  at  the  window 
lattice,  "  Why  tarry  the  wheels  of  his  chariots  ?  " 

How  different  is  the  atmosphere  of  the  Indian  poeml  In  the  foreground 
stands  the  priest,  busily  and  successfully  performing  his  office, 

"As  in  pasture  rich  and  fat  the  cow 
Drips  milk,  so  Vashtha's  song  dripped  over  thee, 
O  Indra  1    Master  of  the  herds  art  thou. 
All  say.    Incline,  accept  our  noblest  offering." 

The  foe  fled  like  cattle  from  the  pasture  when  they  have  lost  their  herder. 
Indra  struck  them  down  the  moment  the  votive  offering  was  cast  upon  his 
altar ;  all  the  offered  sweets  he  gave  to  Sudas  to  enjoy.  What  glimpse  do  we 
catch  here  of  anxiety  and  of  the  outburst  of  prodigious  passion  on  the  part  of 
a  people  battling  for  its  existence  I 


fo  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

cesses,  of  a  kind  of  "struggle  for  existence"  between 
ideas,  on  the  one  hand,  whose  value  for  the  religious 
consciousness  has  dwindled  away  but  which  often 
maintain  themselves  more  or  less  by  a  sheer  faculty  of 
pertinacity  and  those  ideas  which  press  into  promi- 
nence through  being  favored  by  the  advance  of  intel- 
lectual and  material  life. 

A  final  very  marked  characteristic  of  these  divini- 
ties is  that  the  phantasy  of  their  adorers  by  no  means 
raised  them  to  the  highest  level  of  moral  majesty,  as 
they  did  to  positions  of  the  greatest  power  and  highest 
glory.  This  step  of  incomparable  importance  in  the 
evolution  of  religion — the  association  of  the  ideas  of 
God  and  good — as  yet  can  be  descried  in  but  a  few 
faint  signs,  and  this  state  most  surely  marks  the  reli- 
gion as  still  a  barbaric  one.  At  this  stage,  the  thing 
most  essential  to  the  needs  of  the  devout  is  that  the 
God  be  a  strong  and  kindly  ruler,  and  of  an  easily  in- 
fluenced disposition.  But  how  was  it  possible  that 
the  mighty  thunderer  of  pre-Vedic  times,  or  the  mighty 
warrior  and  bestower  of  blessings  of  the  Vedic  reli- 
gion, Indra,  should  be  formed  of  other  ethical  stuff 
than  they,  whose  image  he  was,  the  terrestrial  grands 
seigneurs}  The  savage  battles  which  fill  his  existence 
alternate  with  savage  adventures  of  love  and  drink. 
Very  little  does  he  inquire  into  the  sinfulness  or  recti- 
tude of  mankind  ;  but  all  the  more  is  he  desirous  of 
knowing  who  has  slaughtered  oxen  on  his  altar  and 
brought  as  an  offering  his  favorite  drink,  the  intoxi- 
cating soma,  whose  streams  "pour  into  him  as  rivers 
into  the  ocean,"  and  "fill  his  belly,  head,  and  arms." 
And  it  occasionally  happens  that  he  is  not  over  par- 
ticular about  remembering  the  wishes  which  his  wor- 
shippers have  preferred  in  their  prayers,  as  when  re- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA.  71 

turning  in  the  best  of  humor  to  his  dwelling  from  a 
sacrifice  in  his  honor,  he  says:  "This  is  what  I  will 
do, — no,  that :  I'll  give  him  a  cow  ! — or  shall  it  be  a 
horse  ?  I  wonder  if  I  have  really  had  soma  from  him 
to  drink?" 

Still,  if  one  were  to  contemplate  the  picture  of  the 
Vedic  divinities  from  this  position  only,  he  would  be 
apt  to  falsely  appreciate  the  manifold  complexity  of 
the  intermingling  currents.  Distinct,  it  may  be  they 
were,  originally,  from  the  conceptions  formed  of  the 
gods,  yet  the  ideas  of  right  and  wrong,  the  sympathy 
naturally  felt  with  the  candid  and  fair  man,  the  repu- 
diation of  tortuous  treachery,  dread  of  the  chains  im- 
posed by  guilt  whether  deliberate  or  unintentional,  all 
this,  of  course,  is  well  known  to  the  Vedic  world,  and 
is  expressed  with  sufficient  vivacity  in  the  Vedic  poetry. 
And  why,  indeed,  should  not  this  domain  of  human 
interests  and  laws  also  find  its  rulers  and  representa- 
tives among  the  heavenly  beings  as  well  as  war,  or 
man's  daily  occupation,  or  his  domestic  life  ? 

Although,  therefore,  the  Vedic  divinities  as  such 
and  taken  as  a  whole  manifest  no  special  character  of 
holiness  or  rectitude,  properly  speaking,  there  is  among 
them  one  particular  divinity,  Varuna, — originally  a  lu- 
nar divinity,  as  already  said, — who  assumes,  as  pecu- 
liarly his  own,  the  office  of  caring  for  the  mundane 
moral  order — assisted  by  a  circle  of  less  prominent 
companions,  who  were  originally,  it  is  possible,  the 
sun  and  the  planets.  This  moral  order  is  looked  upon 
as  having  been  originally  established  by  Varuna,  and 
by  Varuna's  strong  arm  and  sorcery  it  is  preserved. 
Varuna  detects  even  the  most  secret  transgression  ; 
his  snares  are  set  for  the  treacherous ;  he  sends  forth 
his  avenging  spirits  ;  he  threatens  the  guilty  with  mis- 


7a  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

fortune,  illness,  death.  He  suffers  his  forgiveness  and 
pardon  to  shield  the  penitent,  who  make  effort  to  ap- 
pease him. 

In  a  song  of  the  Rig-veda,  a  guilt-laden  one,  pur- 
sued by  disaster,  cries:  "I  commune  thus  with  my- 
self :  When  may  I  again  approach  Varuna  ?  What 
offering  will  he  deign  to  accept,  without  showing  an- 
ger? When  shall  I,  my  soul  reviving,  behold  again 
his  favor?  Humbly,  as  a  servant,  will  I  make  repara- 
tion to  him,  merciful  that  he  is,  that  I  may  be  once 
more  blameless.  To  them  that  are  thoughtless,  the 
god  of  the  Aryans  has  given  prudence  ;  wiser  than  the 
knowing  man,  he  advances  them  to  riches." 

Varuna  is  here  called  the  Aryan  god.  The  his- 
torian, however,  can  hardly  approve  the  bard's  claim, 
for  I  believe  we  can  discover  in  the  apparently  Ar- 
yan form  of  this  god  the  signs  of  an  un-Aryan  deriva- 
tion. This  much  at  all  events  is  certain  :  that  faith 
in  their  chief  protector  of  the  right  extends  backward 
into  the  epoch  when  the  ancestors  of  the  Indians 
still  formed  one  people  with  the  ancestors  of  the 
Iranians,  as  they  hesitated  on  the  threshold  of  the 
Indian  peninsula.  This  god  appears  among  the  Indo- 
Iranians  as  Varuna,  among  the  Iranians  (in  the  re- 
ligion of  Zoroaster)  as  the  chief  ruler  of  all  that  is 
good,  Ahura  Mazda,  or  Ormuzd.  We  cannot  trace 
Varuna  beyond  the  age  of  the  Indo-Iranians  into  the 
prior  time  of  the  Indo-Europeans.  Among  the  related 
peoples,  like  the  Greeks  or  Teutons,  we  find  no  signs 
of  him.  Much,  on  the  contrary,  seems  to  me  to  agree 
in  favor  of  the  view  that  the  Indo-Iranians  had  re- 
ceived this  god  from  without,  from  the  regions  sub- 
ject to  Babylonian  civilisation.  If  I  am  right  in  this 
conjecture,  is  it  to  be  looked  upon  as  merely  fortu- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA.  73 

itous  that  right  at  the  time  when  the  remotest  Semitic 
and  pre-Semitic  civilisation  had  fructified  the  religion 
of  the  Aryans,  the  point  lies  where  the  figure  of  the 
sin-avenging  and  sin-forgiving  Varuna  begins  to  sepa- 
rate from  the  primeval  coarseness  of  such  bruiser  and 
tippler  divinities  as  Indra,  and  to  be  distinguished  by 
the  sublime  traits  of  sanctity  and  divine  mercy  ? 

It  has  been  remarked  that  the  cult  devoted  to  di- 
vinities, at  the  point  of  the  evolution  of  the  Veda, 
chiefly  assumes  the  form  of  the  sacrifice.  The  gods 
have  so  far  grown  beyond  human  dimensions  that  the 
magic  spells  which  could  compel  them  at  the  will  of 
man,  no  longer  appear  as  the  proper  agency  with 
which  to  influence  them.  And  on  the  other  hand, 
they  are  as  yet  too  far  removed  from  pure  spirituality 
for  a  purely  spiritual  form  of  adoration.  The  wor- 
shipper may  and  must  make  himself  acceptable  to 
them  by  the  simplest  measures,  industriously,  loudly, 
even  obtrusively.  Resembling  man  as  they  do,  they 
eat  and  drink  like  men.  Accordingly  offerings  of 
food  and  intoxicating  drink  were  needful,  in  order 
to  fortify  them  and  to  stir  them  to  mighty  actions. 
They  had  to  be  flattered  ;  they  were  to  be  addressed 
in  the  most  artfully  agreeable  style,  and  in  the  most 
superlative  expressions  possible  as  to  their  grandeur 
and  their  splendor.  Thereupon  is  the  proper  moment 
for  the  worshippers,  who  sit  around  the  sacrificial  cere- 
mony "like  flies  about  honey,"  to  lay  their  desires 
before  the  gods :  desires  which — corresponding  to  the 
spirit  of  the  age — are  ever  directed  to  the  palpable 
goods  of  earthly  existence, — a  long  life,  posterity,  the 
acquisition  of  property  in  horses  and  cattle,  favorable 
weather,  triumph  over  all  enemies.  The  art  of  prop- 
erly performing  these  sacrifices  and  prayers  is  the 


74  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

main  theme  about  which  the  whole  spiritual  life  of 
the  poets  of  the  Rigveda  revolves.  To  them  the  sac- 
rifice is  the  embodiment  of  all  mysteries,  the  symbol 
of  all  the  most  important  and  profound  of  the  phe- 
nomena of  life.  "By  means  of  sacrifices,  the  gods 
offered  sacrifices, — those  were  the  first  of  all  laws," 
says  the  Rig-Veda. 

The  external  marks  of  the  Vedic  sacrifice  are  so 
far  simple,  that  as  yet  all  the  elements  are  wanting  to 
it,  which  follow  in  the  train  of  urban  life  and  espe- 
cially of  the  development  of  the  fine  arts.  There  are 
no  temples,  no  images  of  the  divinities.  The  cult  of 
shepherd  tribes,  whose  migratory  manner  of  life  has 
not  yet  entirely  become  a  fixed  one,  is  as  yet  satisfied 
with  a  very  simple  altar, — established  with  the  same 
facility  everywhere, — the  level,  cleared  greensward, 
over  which  soft  grass  is  strewn,  about  the  holy  fires, 
as  a  resting-place  for  the  invisible  gods,  who  quickly 
collect  from  the  atmospheric  regions  around. 

But  there  is  no  lack  of  artful  embellishment  of  an- 
other kind  in  the  Vedic  sacrifice, — or  even  of  an  over- 
embellishment,  according  to  Oriental  custom.  The 
song  of  praise  and  prayer,  delivered  at  the  sacrifice, 
is  fashioned  after  the  rules  of  an  elaborate  art,  grow- 
ing ever  more  intricate.  It  is  overladen  with  obscure 
allusions,  in  which  theological  mysticism  parades  its 
acquaintance  with  the  hidden  depths  and  crannies  of 
things  divine.  To  utter  such  a  prayer  and  to  offer  up 
such  a  sacrifice  not  every  one  is  called  or  fitted  whom 
the  inner  impulse  moves,  but  only  the  trained  priest, 
one  belonging  to  certain  families  who  have  formed  an 
exclusive  spiritual  caste  from  time  immemorial, — the 
priest  who  alone  is  accounted  equal  to  the  perilous, 
sacred  duty  of  eating  of  the  sacrificial  feast,  and  to 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA.  75 

drink  of  the  soma,  the  intoxicating  drink  of  the  gods. 
At  sacrificial  ceremonies  of  greater  importance  priests 
of  this  kind  appear  in  throngs,  singing,  reciting,  and 
performing  the  immense  number  of  prescribed  acts 
with  that  painful,  purely  external  nicety  which  is  pe- 
culiar to  every  cult  standing  at  this  point  of  historical 
development,  and  the  displacement  of  which  by  the 
inner  soul-life  is  everywhere  the  product  of  protracted 
later  evolution. 

Religious  ceremony  of  this  sort  is,  indeed,  far  from 
having  attained  to  the  "affair  of  conscience''  of  the  de- 
vout believer — to  the  elevation  of  a  force  which  exalts 
and  clarifies  his  inner  life.  It  is — conducted  on  a 
large  scale  and  with  reference  to  human  interests  as  a 
whole — simply  what  the  cult  of  sorcery  of  an  earlier 
age  had  been  in  a  small  way  and  with  reference  to 
some  particular  human  want :  a  practice  which  any 
one,  who  could  bear  the  expense,  might  have  put  into 
motion  for  himself  by  the  skilled  practitioner,  to  en- 
rich one's  self,  to  prolong  life,  to  avert  sickness  and 
all  harm. 

But  here  there  is  repeated,  in  matters  purely  of 
cult,  the  same  characteristic  which  confronted  us  in 
another  connexion.  Alongside  of  and  interwoven  with 
the  formations  which  carry  the  special  imprint  of  Vedic 
culture,  everywhere  and  often  in  compact  masses, 
there  are  the  remains  of  hoary  constructions,  traceable 
to  remoter  and  even  to  remotest  times.  As  just  re- 
marked, it  is  a  peculiarity  of  the  Vedic  cult  of  the 
sacrifice,  that  it  concerns  itself  chiefly  with  human  in- 
terests viewed  as  a  whole  ;  but  still  it  was  an  unavoid- 
able retention,  that  the  supernatural  forces  should  be 
put  into  action,  upon  occasion,  for  individual  and  par- 
ticular situations,  in  behalf  of  want  or  suffering  at  some 


76  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

particular  moment.  It  is  here  that  the  old  witchcraft 
especially  retained  whatever  was  left  to  it  of  its  former 
importance,  in  the  Vedic  age.  He  who  wished  to 
drive  away  evil  spirits,  or  the  substance  supposed  to 
have  brought  an  illness,  or,  similarly,  some  guilt,  had 
recourse  still,  as  in  former  ages,  to  fire,  which  con- 
sumes the  hostile  thing,  or  to  water  which  washes  it 
away,  or  he  chased  the  spirits  away  with  din  and 
alarms,  blows  and  bow-shot.  He  who  wished  to  pro- 
duce rain,  proceeded  much  like  the  rain-conjurer 
among  the  savages  of  our  day.  He  put  on  black  robes, 
and  slew  in  sacrifice  some  black-colored  beast,  in  or- 
der to  attract  the  black  clouds  with  which  it  was  de- 
signed to  cover  the  sky  ;  or,  he  threw  herbs  into  the 
water  that  the  grass  of  his  pastures  might  be  splattered 
by  the  divine  waters.  He  who  wished  to  prepare  him- 
self for  particularly  holy  rites,  acted  just  as  the  mod- 
ern savage  does,  when  he  strives  to  transport  himself 
into  the  exalted  state  in  which  man  may  enjoy  com- 
munion with  the  gods.  One  about  to  perform  the  sac- 
rifice of  the  soma,  prepared  himself  for  his  holy  labor, 
clad  in  dark-colored  skins,  muttering  in  stuttering 
speech,  fasting  until  "there  is  nothing  left  in  him, 
nothing  but  skin  and  bones,  till  the  black  pupil  disap- 
pears from  his  eye,"  maintaining  his  position  beside 
the  magic  fire  which  frightened  away  the  evil  demons, 
thus  producing  within  him  the  necessary  condition  of 
inner  fever  {tapas)\  a  practice,  which  lies  in  the  midst 
of  the  Vedic  ritual  as  an  unintelligible  relic  of  by-gone 
ages,  but  which  a  modern  American  Indian  or  a  Zulu 
would  comprehend  at  once,  since  very  similar  customs 
are  familiar  to  him. 

Thus,  the  religion  and  the  cult  of   the  Veda  point 
on  the  one  hand  to  the  past  of  the  savage  religion  ;  on 


THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  VEDA.  77 

the  other  hand,  they  point  forward.  We  have  seen 
that  the  majority  of  the  Vedic  divinities  had  long  since 
lost  their  original  meaning.  Indra  is  no  more  the 
thunderer  ;  nor  Varuna  the  night-illuminating  planet. 
For  a  time  the  faded  images  of  the  powers,  which  were 
once  effective  in  their  influence  upon  human  faith, 
maintain  their  entity  by  the  sheer  force  of  pertinacity 
— similar  to  a  movement,  which,  receiving  no  fresh 
impulse,  gradually  dies  away.  The  point  will  come 
at  which  the  motion  will  cease.  The  intellect,  pressing 
onward,  recognises  other  forces  as  the  effective.  New 
exigencies  of  the  soul  require  to  be  satisfied  by  other 
means  than  those  proffered  by  the  benevolence  of  In- 
dra or  Agni. 


BUDDHISM. 


HAVING  in  the  preceding  essay  sought  to  establish 
the  position  which  the  earliest  form  of  the  Indian 
religion  properly  occupies  in  the  great  process  of  the 
evolution  of  religion,  the  task  presents  itself  of  at- 
tempting to  fix  a  similar  historical  position  for  a  later 
stage  of  the  same  growth,  namely  for  ancient  Bud- 
dhism,— one  of  those  structures  in  the  history  of  re- 
ligion, which,  as  a  complete  expression  of  deepest 
content,  may  well  be  classified  with  the  classic  types 
of  human  religion  and  human  pursuit  of  salvation. 


The  prevailing  mood  and,  even  more  yet,  the  forms 
of  mental  expression  in  which  the  thought  and  life  of 
the  mendicant  Buddhist  monks  revolved  possess  an 
almost  contemporary  double  upon  Greek  soil:  the  cre- 
ations of  the  West  and  the  East  corresponding  closely 
to  each  other  to  an  astonishing  degree,  in  matters  the 
most  essential  as  well  as  in  the  most  subordinate,  even 
to  the  coining  of  rally-words  about  which  the  religious 
consciousness  loves  to  concentrate,  or  to  the  drawing 
of  similes  which  aim  to  make  the  grand  direction  of 
events  in  some  sort  palpable  to  the  imagination,  and 
which,  while  apparently  of  inferior  import,  often  really 
belong  to  the  most  powerful  factors  of  religion. 


BUDDHISM,  79 

It  is  plainly  no  mere  accident  that  a  harmony  be- 
tween the  ideas  of  two  people,  so  widely  separated 
both  in  space  and  national  characteristics,  should  be 
so  much  more  strongly  and  variously  accentuated, 
just  at  the  period  of  evolution  of  which  we  are  here 
speaking,  than  it  was  before  that  time.  The  myth- 
building  imagination  which  holds  sway  during  the 
earlier  periods,  proceeds  without  aim  or  method  upon 
its  course.  It  receives  its  impulse  from  chance ;  acci- 
dent combines  in  it  capriciously  materials  widely  di- 
vergent in  character ;  as  if  at  play,  accident  pours 
into  its  lap,  out  of  a  copious  horn,  forms  which  are 
sometimes  of  noteworthy  depth  and  meaning,  some- 
times absurd,  but  which  are  ever  changing  and  dis- 
placing each  other.  But  when  reflexion,  presently 
developing  into  sustained  and  systematic  investiga- 
tion, takes  a  grasp  of  some  firmness  and  certainty  on 
the  problems  of  the  cosmos  and  human  existence,  the 
scope  of  possibilities  contracts.  However  untrained 
the  mind  may  be  in  this  age,  yet  the  things  that  ap- 
pear to  it  perforce  as  realities,  go  far  to  compel  hu- 
man ideas  into  a  fixed  and  constrained  course,  like 
a  stream  into  its  bed;  and  thus  the  most  manifold 
lineaments,  showing  remarkable  resemblances  to  each 
other,  are  similarly  impressed  upon  analogous  courses 
of  thought  in  widely  different  parts  of  the  world,  as 
was  the  case  with  those  which  preoccupied  the  Greek 
and  Indian  minds. 

Being  wholly  without  any  knowledge  as  to  the  time- 
limitations  of  Vedic  antiquity,  we  can  hardly  attempt 
to  estimate  the  number  of  centuries  lying  between 
the  origin  of  the  Rig- Veda  hymns  and  the  rise  of  Bud- 
dha, the  founder  of  the  Buddhistic  monastic  order. 
But  we  have  sufficient  reason  to  fix  the  latter  event  as 


8o  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

having  taken  place  in  the  latter  half  of  the  sixth  cen- 
tury before  Christ.  The  religious  movements  which 
prepared  the  way  for  it  and  created  a  sort  of  Bud- 
dhistic atmosphere  before  the  appearance  of  Buddha, 
must  certainly  have  occupied  a  length  of  time  which 
is  to  be  measured  by  centuries.  So  much  is  certain 
that  great  historical  changes  occurred  in  India  be- 
tween the  age  of  the  bards  who  sang  at  the  Vedic 
altars,  and  that  of  the  Buddhistic  monastic  thinkers. 
The  tribes  who  had  originally  settled  as  shepherds  in 
the  northwest  corner  of  the  peninsula,  and  who  were 
still  close  to  the  gates  by  which  they  had  shortly  be- 
fore entered  India,  had  in  the  meantime  penetrated 
still  farther.  Having  taken  possession  of  a  broad  do- 
main stretching  down  the  Ganges,  the  period  of  mi- 
gration and  of  conquest  over  the  obscure  aborigines 
is  over.  Cities  have  long  since  risen  in  the  midst  of 
the  villages  in  which  had  lived  the  herd  owners  of  the 
older  time, — some  of  them  were  great  municipalities, 
seats  of  all  the  commotion  and  activity  of  splendid 
despotic  Oriental  courts,  where  commerce  and  manu- 
factures are  highly  developed,  where  life  receives  zest 
from  a  voluptuously  refined  luxury,  and  where  have  be- 
come established  sharp  social  differentiations  of  rich 
and  poor,  master  and  slave.  The  conditions  have 
thus  been  prepared,  where,  abandoning  gradually  the 
careless  and  aimless  existence,  for  the  day  as  it  were, 
of  the  earlier  period,  the  human  mind  of  the  new  pe- 
riod now  becomes  maturer  and  more  thoughtful,  may 
begin  to  weave  a  connected  fabric  of  reflexions  upon 
the  import,  the  end,  and  the  value  of  human  existence. 
Accordingly,  in  India,  very  similarly  and  at  almost 
the  same  time  as  in  Greece,  edifices  of  spiritual  thought 
and  doctrine  arise  which  soar  to  a  height  far  above 


BUDDHISM.  8i 

the  ancient  structures.  And  they  can,  indeed,  be  de- 
scribed, almost  with  completeness  and  in  detail,  with- 
out feeling  the  necessity  of  intermingling  any  distinc- 
tively Indian  or  Greek  characteristics  in  the  descrip- 
tion ;  so  much  is  the  type  developed  by  the  one  people 
like  that  developed  by  the  other. 

To  the  devout  worshipper  of  the  former  age,  com- 
muning with  his  god  by  means  of  sacrifice  and  prayer, 
the  knowledge  of  his  god  and  of  the  art  by  which  the 
god's  favor  may  be  secured,  does  not  appear  as  some- 
thing self-achieved  or  self-created,  or  indeed  created 
by  any  person.  Rather,  it  is  an  intuition,  the  presence 
of  which  is  a  simple  fact,  and  the  possession  of  which 
by  one's  self  as  well  as  by  every  other  rational  being 
is  a  matter  of  course.  But  a  change  takes  place.  The 
intellect,  as  it  proceeds  in  its  experience  of  the  toil  and 
the  pleasure  of  personal  search,  learns  to  know  the 
elation  of  finding,  the  pride  felt  in  knowledge  which 
has  been  personally  achieved  and  wrested  from  re- 
ality after  many  long  and  painful  struggles.  A  man 
enjoys  the  final  triumph  of  his  vision,  the  keenness  of 
which  he  has  himself  trained,  and  which  is  able  to 
penetrate  to  the  centre  of  things,  differently  from  the 
masses,  common-place  beings,  who  stop  at  the  surface 
of  things.  Among  them  he  feels  himself  like  one  who 
can  see  among  the  blind. 

Evidently  enough,  those  possessed  of  such  a  vision 
are  not  sufficiently  numerous  to  compose  more  than 
small  knots  of  thinkers  made  up  of  the  serious  kind,  of 
those  whose  sentiments  are  of  the  more  delicate  or  re- 
fined sort,  of  those  who  cultivate  their  inner  life  with 
more  than  ordinary  zeal.  In  the  bosom  of  these  61ite 
bands,  embodying  their  spiritual  acquisitions  to  the 
greatest  degree  of  perfection,  there  can  or  must  be 


8a  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

certain  particular  individuals,  dominating  personal- 
ities, who,  however,  can  be  the  leading  spirits  that 
they  are  only  because  they  express  with  the  greatest 
energy  in  their  own  persons  the  same  life  and  action 
that  animates  their  companions. 

Thus,  in  sharp  contrast  with  the  great  mass  of  the 
unenlightened,  there  is  developed  the  type  of  half- 
heroic,  half-philosophic  heroes  or  virtuosi.  A  concep- 
tion of  this  sort  is  hardly  conceivable  in  a  time  like 
that  of  the  Veda,  or  of  Homer.  True,  he  who  had 
distinguished  himself  as  a  fine  bard,  or  as  an  expert 
sacrificer,  or  as  an  adept  and  successful  priest  and 
sorcerer,  may  have  had  his  honors  in  that  age,  too.  But 
he  was  always  nothing  more  than  the  type  of  a  genus,  a 
prominent  expert  in  the  use  of  the  tools  of  the  religious 
trade  which  had  representatives  everywhere.  But  the 
men  whom  we  are  now  looking  at  are  something  very 
different.  They  were,  or  so  appeared  to  be,  persons 
who  possessed  a  distinctive  stamp  of  their  own ;  they 
were  sublime  pathfinders,  pioneers,  not  to  be  com- 
pared with  other  mortals,  steeped  in  the  powers  of  a 
peculiar  mystical  completeness  and  perfection. 

It  is  a  part  of  the  essential  character  of  such  men 
that  they  are  conceivable  to  the  creed  of  their  follow- 
ers only  in  the  singular.  The  name  of  such  a  single 
individual  is  needed  as  a  rally-cry  around  which  the  co- 
endeavorers  can  unite  ;  and  if  such  a  personage  never 
actually  existed,  recourse  is  had  to  the  dim  recesses 
of  the  mythical  past  for  one  of  the  obscurely  grandiose 
names  of  that  misty  world,  and  around  it  are  concen- 
trated their  spiritual  possessions  in  which  men  find 
such  great  bliss  and  often  consolation. 

Whilst  the  personal  position  of  the  devotee  with 
reference  to  his  religious  belief  is  thus  undergoing 


BUDDHISM.  83 

modification  and  becoming  a  very  different  one,  the 
matter  and  content  of  the  behef,  too,  is  at  the  same 
time  assuming  a  new  aspect. 

Those  supernatural  giants,  who  were  the  gods  of 
the  older  age,  now  cease  to  govern  the  world  accord- 
ing to  human-like  caprices.  The  government  is  trans- 
ferred to  powers  of  another  kind,  which,  although  they 
were  well-known  ere  this,  in  a  primitive  form,  to  the 
intellect,  leave  the  low,  contracted  sphere  of  super- 
stition and  advance  to  the  heights  of  thought,  which 
afford  a  wider  vision : — forces  and  substances  which 
are  put  in  action  by  the  mechanism  of  an  impersonal 
necessity,  their  action  bemg  the  kernel  of  the  cosmic 
process  itself. 

These  forces  and  substances  are,  of  course,  very 
different,  indeed,  from  those  which  modern  learning 
recognises  as  the  recondite  fundamental  factors  of  be- 
ing and  happening.  As  the  products  of  an  analysis, 
which  has  still  to  learn  the  task  of  being  thorough, 
they  are  rather  the  most  prominent  and  first  notice- 
able of  the  light  and  shadow  masses  of  the  universe, 
natural  laws  and  impulses  which  most  frequently  press 
upon  his  attention.  Thus,  the  physical  elements  like 
water  and  fire,  members  which  exert  so  much  attrac- 
tive force  upon  the  intellect  in  the  youthful  period  of 
the  human  mind,  the  great  impulses  of  love  and  hatred, 
the  fluctuation  of  happening  (becoming)  and  being 
with  its  immutable  calm.  Substances  and  forces,  of 
which  the  importance  varies  with  place  and  people, 
but  which,  taken  as  a  whole,  have  everywhere  the 
same  appearance,  and  therefore  belong  properly  to 
the  same  category  of  reflexions  upon  the  world  and  its 
course. 

The  human  soul  is  the  special  object  to  which  this 


84  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

incipient  rumination  now  more  and  more  directs  itself. 
To  those  ages  of  spiritual  childhood,  wholly  preoccu- 
pied with  phenomena,  the  outer  world,  follows  the  pe- 
riod of  youth,  which  gradually  becomes  introspective, 
with  all  the  earnestness  of  youth,  all  its  sense  of  honor, 
its  heaving  bosom  panting  with  the  thirst  after  bound- 
less ideals.  The  ego  is  subjected  to  investigation  to 
see  if  the  secret  cannot  be  found  in  it  for  the  attain- 
ment of  those  ideals.  There  is  a  growing  desire  to 
find  a  clue  for  the  labyrinth  of  the  phenomena  of  the 
soul.  Efforts  are  made  to  dissect  its  parts  or  forces ; 
to  comprehend  the  influences  mutually  exerted  by 
them  upon  each  other;  to  observe  the  entrance  and 
cessation  of  the  soul's  various  functions. 

Of  foremost  importance  in  these  new  lines  of 
thought  is  the  idea  of  the  migration  of  the  soul.  True, 
this  idea  does  not  suddenly  step  forth,  full-grbwn  and 
matured,  now  for  the  first  time.  The  beginnings  of 
the  doctrine  appear  everywhere  to  be  traceable  to  the 
dawn  of  religion ;  that  the  soul  of  the  deceased  can 
make  its  dwelling-place,  temporarily  or  permanently, 
in  animals,  plants,  or  in  other  things  of  every  sort,  is 
a  belief  spread  over  the  whole  world  among  peoples 
of  low  civilisation. 

It  was  reserved  for  the  subtler  refinement  of  the 
age  we  are  now  speaking  of,  however,  to  impress  with 
the  strongest  kind  of  emphasis  the  additional  idea 
upon  this  doctrine,  of  its  continuation  through  endless 
stretches  of  futurity,  the  horror  of  eternal  futility,  in- 
exhaustible endurance. 

The  hitherside  of  life,  which  had  circumscribed 
almost  all  the  hopes  and  desires  of  the  ancients,  now 
appears  petty  and  meaningless,  being  contrasted  with 
the  vast  spaces  beyond ;   the  terrestrial  life  becomes  a 


BUDDHISM.  85 

mere  place  of  preparation.  Whatever  of  good  one 
has  performed  here  below,  whatever  of  sin  committed, 
will  redound  to  him  over  there,  perhaps  infinitely 
magnified, — as  reward  or  punishment. 

In  the  literature  of  an  age  working  on  this  idea, 
the  type  of  voyages  to  the  nether  world  and  hell,  plays 
a  prominent  part :  not  the  mere  tales  of  story-tellers 
as  in  the  time  of  the  Odyssey,  but  writings  animated 
with  the  purpose  of  picturing  vividly  to  the  senses  the 
awfulness  and  the  inexorability  of  the  punishment  to 
be  surely  expected  in  the  hereafter  for  even  small 
transgressions.  Throughout  is  dominant  an  austere, 
even  anxious  solicitude,  to  preserve  the  personal  ego 
from  contamination,  even  the  most  trifling,  in  order 
to  secure  for  it  a  completeness  and  perfection  which 
will  impart  confidence  and  hope  to  it  while  upon  the 
dark  journey  of  the  hereafter.  But  the  chief  good, 
which  belongs  to  such  a  complete  perfection, — the 
objective  point  to  which  those  journeys  tend, — is  the 
final  release  from  the  soul's  migration,  the  exaltation 
of  self  over  all  finite  rewards  and  punishments,  the 
entrance  of  the  soul  into  the  world  of  things  eternal. 

It  is  part  of  the  character  of  the  age  here  portrayed 
— that  which  we  have  called  the  spiritual  youth  of 
man — that  it  can  recognise  as  its  objective  point  only 
an  absolute  one, — one  embracing  within  itself  the  ab- 
solute perfection.  As  soon  as  the  intellect  grows  fond 
of  absorbing  itself  in  the  antitheses  of  the  transitory 
and  the  eternal,  of  happening  and  being,  it  is  unavoid- 
able that  the  destiny  of  everything  incomplete,  imper- 
fected,  should  appear  to  be  swept  along  in  the  stream 
of  the  incessant  process  of  becoming  and  passing 
away.  But  in  the  existence  of  the  perfect,  all  move- 
ment in  the  sense  of  change,  which  necessarily  cleaves 


86  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

to  the  concept  of  the  unattained  goal  or  summit,  must 
have  ended;  and  the  dwelling-place  of  the  perfect 
must  lie  in  some  sphere  which  spreads  over  and  above 
the  inappeasable  unrest  of  the  imperfect. 

But  who  is  it  that  may  attain  to  this  highest  goal? 
The  answer  might  be  and  was  given :  "He  who  had 
been  purified  by  special  consecrations,  by  the  observ- 
ance of  special  mysterious  regulations,  and  even  by 
the  precepts  of  sorcery."  But  in  this  age,  everything 
necessarily  led  to  a  new  turn  of  belief.  Mention  has 
been  made  of  how,  in  those  contracted  circles  where 
the  thoughts  just  laid  down  were  cultivated,  the  think- 
er's self-appreciation  and  seriousness  induced  a  grow- 
ing consciousness  of  his  differentiation  from  and  su- 
periority to  those  who  were  without  the  pale,  the 
thoughtless,  the  blind.  That  world  of  eternal  things 
is  intelligible  only  to  the  thinker.  And  the  thinker 
alone,  therefore,  may  participate  therein.  True,  the 
motive,  dating  from  a  far  remoter  time,  which  was 
allowed  to  the  good  man, — even  the  commonplace 
member  of  society,  so  long  as  he  is  good, — that  of  the 
hope  of  reward  in  the  hereafter,  has  not  lost  all  of  its 
old  effectiveness.  But  it  is  subordinate  to  the  more 
powerful  motive,  that  the  chief  and  incomparable  sal- 
vation in  a  world,  of  which  but  the  few  have  knowl- 
edge, can  accrue,  not  to  the  poor  in  spirit,  but  only 
to  those  elect  few,  the  thinkers,  whose  whole  life  is 
directed  to  the  one  pursuit  of  shaking  off  terrestrial 
imperfections,  and  of  thus  achieving  a  citizenship  in 
the  empire  of  things  eternal. 

There  is  necessarily  much  of  the  local  color  want- 
ing to  our  portrayel  of  these  views, — much  of  all  the 
concrete  reality.  For  the  purpose  has  been  to  trace 
the  general  outline  of  a  particular  stage  of  religious 


BUDDHISM.  87 

evolution  common  alike  to  India  and  Greece.  This 
general  abstract  assumed  concrete  shape  in  India  in 
Buddhism  and  its  kindred  forms ;  in  Greece  in  a 
movement  first  manifest  under  the  cloak  of  the  an- 
cient mysteries,  presently  struggling  again  and  again 
toward  precision  and  clearness  of  thought,  as  the  re- 
flective mind  strives  to  tear  the  veils  which  obstruct 
its  vision,  only  to  fall  back  as  often  into  the  former 
twilight  of  mysteries  again, — all  the  forms  of  this 
movement,  however,  breathing  forth  the  same  spirit, 
the  wishing  one's  self  out  of  this  transitory  world  into 
the  eternal  world.* 

Here,  prominently,  the  mysteries  of  Orpheus  pre- 
sent themselves  to  notice ;  that  mysterious  doctrine 
and  cult  of  sects  concentrating  about  the  much-fabled 
name  of  the  bard  of  Thrace.  Dating,  as  it  appears, 
from  the  sixth  century  before  Christ,  and  cultivated 
at  Athens,  and  many  other  places,  especially  in  the 
Greek  colonies  of  Lower  Italy,  this  doctrine  and  cult 
sought  to  prepare  its  devotees,  as  '*The  Pure,"  for 
the  future  glory  by  ceremonies  of  consecration,  sacred 
teaching,  and  the  holy  orders  of  the  "Orphean  Life." 
Our  knowledge  of  the  peculiar  ideas  of  this  cult  is 
very  limited.  But  whoever  approaches  the  little  which 
has  been  preserved,  with  the  dogmas  and  the  poetry 
of  the  Indian  mendicant  monks  in  mind,  will  often  be 
surprised,  at  coming  upon  what  seems  a  bit  of  Bud- 
dhism in  the  midst  of  Greek  civilisation. 

Alongside  of  the  Orphean  mysteries,  and  closely 
related  to  them,  stands  the  sect  of  Pythagoreans,  es- 
tablished by  and  named  after  a  man  whose  powerful, 

•  The  chief  features  of  this  movement  have  lately  been  portrayed  with  as 
much  sage  penetration,  as  fine  restoration  of  the  sentiment,  by  E.  Rohde, 
Psyche  (1893),  p.  395  S.  At  many  points,  what  here  follows  is  an  acceptanc«  of 
his  views. 


88  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

deeply  forceful  personality  shines  through  the  mist  of 
a  meagre  legendary  tradition  with  astonishing  clear- 
ness. Whilst  the  best-known  characteristic  of  the 
Pythagorean  speculations  is  the  attempt  to  discover 
in  numbers  the  most  secret  and  essential  kernel  of  all 
things,  yet  our  attention  here  is  chiefly  to  be  directed 
to  the  efforts  of  these  closely  confederated  companions 
to  liberate  the  soul  of  its  imprisonment  (for  as  such 
they  looked  upon  corporeal  existence),  and  from  the 
bonds  of  the  soul's  migration. 

We  cannot  attempt  here  to  follow  the  current  of 
these  religious-philosophical  speculations  in  the  Greece 
of  the  sixth  and  fifth  centuries  B.  C,  through  all  its 
various  ramifications.  It  is,  however,  to  be  mentioned 
that  the  influence  of  the  Orphean  and  Pythagorean 
ideas  continues,  clearly  recognisable,  up  to  the  very 
acme  of  all  Greek  thought,  up  to  Plato's  time.  Plato's 
conceptions  as  to  the  chief  aims  of  human  existence 
stand  in  closest  contact  with  those  of  his  mystic  pred- 
ecessors. True,  it  is  with  a  strength  of  which  the 
latter  fall  far  short,  that  his  intellect  attempts  to  break 
the  shackles  of  creed  and  imagination,  and  to  gain  the 
conquest  of  a  complete  scientific  certainty.  But  quickly 
enough — soonest  of  all  in  the  problems  of  the  human 
soul  and  its  future  destiny — he,  too,  finds  that  he  has 
gotten  to  the  boundary-lines  of  those  regions,  the  en- 
trance to  which  is  barred  to  even  the  philosopher's 
cognition  and  proof. 

It  is  Plato's  fashion  not  to  stop  for  such  a  reason. 
When  the  dialectician  halts,  the  poet  begins  to  speak: 
and  in  pictures  of  profound  beauty,  the  poesy  of  Plato 
unrolls  its  grand  views  of  the  hereafter,  the  subterran- 
ean realm  of  the  shades,  and  the  realm  of  light  and 
eternal  ideas.     He  is  accustomed  to  fortify  himself  by 


BUDDHISM.  89 

an  appeal  to  what  he  has  heard  "from  men  and  wo- 
men who  are  wise  in  things  divine";  what  Pindar  and 
many  other  of  the  poets,  "such  of  them  as  are  in- 
spired," have  uttered;  but  it  is  especially  the  Orphe- 
ans  from  whose  dark  wisdom  he  loves  on  such  occa- 
sions to  draw  half-mantled  and  half-revealed  matter, 
images  from  the  same  realm,  intermediate  between 
thought  and  invention,  in  the  twilight  of  which  the 
creations  of  Buddhism,  too,  have  their  being. 

We  shall  next  throw  a  glance  at  the  chief  features 
of  both  the  Indian  and  the  Greek  chains  of  thought,  in 
which  embodiments  of  the  type  just  described  in  the 
history  of  religion  may  be  recognised.  The  close  re- 
lationship between  the  two  sets  of  ideas  will  be  con- 
firmed throughout. 

II. 

In  both  Greece  and  India,  societies  of  devotees 
were  formed.  They  gave  themselves  a  name  which 
served  to  remind  them  of  their  real  or  supposed 
founder,  from  Orpheus  or  Pythagoras,  just  as  the 
"monk-disciples  of  the  son  of  the  Shakya"  did.  In 
close  communion  with  each  other,  and  separated  from 
the  masses  without,  they  strive  after  a  salvation  which 
they  hope  to  attain  upon  the  strength  of  their  own 
particular  doctrine  and  their  own  particular  intellec- 
tual and  spiritual  discipline. 

True, — as  one  of  the  more  recent  historians  of  these 
Greek  developments  has  already  observed, — the  seg- 
regation of  these  sectaries  from  the  world  was  of  a 
much  milder  character  in  Greece  than  in  India,  cor- 
responding to  the  differences  in  the  national  charac- 
ters.    Among  the  Buddhists  the  religious  idea  takes 


go  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

possession  of  the  whole  life  of  devotees,  with  unlim- 
ited force  and  austerity.  It  destroys  their  mundane 
existence,  with  a  logical  consistency  as  thoroughly 
merciless  as  ever  any  idea  has  destroyed  man's  en- 
joyment of  temporal  life. 

In  the  sacred  legend,  the  royal  scion,  who  after- 
wards becomes  the  Buddha,  thirsting  for  the  life  spi- 
ritual, flees  at  night  from  his  palace,  where,  recum- 
bent upon  a  flower-strewn  couch,  his  young  wife  lies 
slumbering,  a  young  mother,  beside  her  their  first  and 
newly  born  son  whom  the  father  has  not  yet  beheld. 

Possibly  without  any  credibility  in  the  ordinary 
historical  sense,  this  legend  nevertheless  possesses  a 
complete  intrinsic  veracity.  The  Buddhist,  being 
most  deeply  agitated  by  his  craving  for  redemption, 
abandons  home  and  wealth,  wife  and  child  :  they  are 
bonds  chaining  him  down  to  earthly  life.  He  wanders 
from  place  to  place,  a  homeless  beggar. 

In  Greece,  there  is  greater  moderation.  True,  the 
communities  searching  for  redemption,  in  Greece  too, 
consider  the  present  world  as  a  place  of  uncleanness, 
of  imprisonment ;  but  there  is  no  very  great  serious- 
ness in  their  efforts  to  escape  from  this  thraldom. 
Outwardly  they  continue  to  observe  the  duties  and 
enjoy  the  pleasures  of  every-day  life,  and  are  satisfied 
with  the  practice  of  securing  inwardly  a  release  from 
the  limitations  of  such  a  life  by  the  secret  power  of 
the  mystic  doctrine  and  the  mystic  cult. 

Whatever  the  peculiarities  of  the  different  sets  of 
ideas  evolved  by  these  pious  communities,  the  one 
feature  is  common  to  them  all :  this  world  appears  to 
all  of  them  as  a  gloomy  domain  of  dissension  and  suf- 
fering. The  symbolism  of  the  Orpheans  has  it  that 
Dionysus,  the  divinity,  is  torn   to  pieces  by  Titans: 


BUDDHISM.  91 

the  blessed  unity  of  all  Being  undergoes  the  evil  fate 
of  disintegration. 

Another  Greek  conception,  of  the  sixth  century  B. 
C,  discerns  in  the  material  existence  of  things  a  guilt ; 
all  heavens  and  all  worlds,  issuing  from  unity  and  in- 
finity, having  become  guilty  of  wrong,  must  pay  the 
penalty  and  do  penance  therefor,  resolving  themselves 
again  into  the  components  from  which  they  originally 
came  into  being. 

One  noticeable  trait  is  introduced  into  the  appraisal 
of  this  existence  by  speculations  which  are  traceable 
first  of  all  to  the  great  obscure  Ephesian,  Heraclitus. 
"All  things  are  in  flux," — all  being  is  a  continuous 
change,  self-mutation.  "Into  the  same  stream  we 
step  and  yet  do  not  step ;  we  are  and  are  not."  This 
restless  flux  of  becoming  and  passing  away  again  is 
also  characteristic  of  the  human  soul,  which  essenti- 
ally is  identical  with  the  least  corporeal  of  the  ele- 
ments, fire.  As  the  existence  of  flame  is  a  continuing 
death  and  re-generation,  so  the  soul  lives  in  the  cease- 
less production  and  passing  away,  in  the  ceaseless 
ebbing  and  flowing  of  its  elements.  Its  apparently 
undisturbed  continuity  of  identity  is  a  deception. 

True,  Heraclitus  himself,  buoyant  and  active  by 
nature,  did  not  tint  this  doctrine  with  the  gloomy  color 
of  lamentation  that  human  destiny  was  therefore  all 
aimless  and  made  up  of  suflering.  But  to  thinkers, 
who  were  inclined  to  look  upon  the  continuity  and 
constancy  of  a  supreme  eternal  being  as  the  sole  satis- 
factory reply  to  their  inquiries  regarding  the  end  of 
human  life,  this  philosophical  abstraction  concerning 
the  nature  of  material  existence  was  identical  with  de- 
spair in  its  utter  and  hopeless  emptiness.  Thus,  to 
Plato,  this  is  a  world  of  immaterial  seeming.     Verity 


92  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

and  complete  satisfaction  are  obtainable  aloft  only,  in 
the  flights  beyond,  where  are  the  eternal  ideas ;  thither 
the  soul,  fallen  from  its  bright  estate,  home- sick, 
yearns  ardently  to  return. 

Now  contrast  with  these  Greek  thoughts  their 
counterparts  in  India.  In  the  age  when  the  way  for 
Buddhism  was  being  prepared,  thought  moves  exactly 
in  the  same  lines  as  it  did  with  Plato,  being  a  contrast 
of  that  which  is  and  persists,  and  that  which  is  transi- 
tory. On  the  one  hand,  the  soul  of  the  universe,  the 
great  One,  ever  untouched  by  pain ;  on  the  other  hand, 
the  world  of  phenomena,  the  realm  of  hunger  and 
thirst,  of  care  and  perplexity,  of  old  age  and  death. 
And,  like  Heraclitus,  Buddhism  too  sees  in  this  lat- 
ter world  a  continuous  flux  of  becoming  and  passing 
away,  a  never-ending  concatenation  of  causes  and  ef- 
fects,— the  latter  in  their  turn  also  becoming  causes 
which  continue  to  produce  new  effects,  and  so  on  to 
infinity.  Peace  there  is  alone  in  the  world  of  "the 
unborn,  of  that  which  has  not  yet  come  into  being, 
has  not  yet  been  made,  has  not  yet  assumed  form," 
in  the  realm  of  the  Nirvana. 

An  early  Buddhistic  dialogue  compares  life  to  a 
tree,  the  root  of  which  is  perishable  and  mutable,  as 
are  also  its  trunk,  and  branches,  and  leaves :  who  can 
believe  that  the  shadow  of  such  a  tree  will  always  re- 
main the  same  and  escape  the  fate  of  change  ?  "But 
the  unstable — is  it  suffering  or  joy?"  asks  Buddha  of 
his  disciples.  And  they  answer  :  "  Suffering,  master  ! " 
Or,  in  the  words  of  a  stanza,  oft  repeated : 

"All  shape  assumed  inconstant  is,  unstable, 
All  subject  to  the  fate  of  birth  and  death. 
It  comes  to  pass,  and  soon  it  vanishes. 
Blessed  rest,  when  th'  space  of  birth  and  death  is  donel " 


BUDDHISM,  93 

Moreover,  we  find  here  exactly  the  same  applica- 
tion of  the  aforementioned  fundamental  philosophical 
views  that  we  do  in  Heraclitus.  In  both  cases  they 
are  applied  to  the  soul  and  its  life.  "Disciples!" 
says  Buddha,  "That  which  is  called  soul,  or  spirit, or 
reason,  is  ever  changing  and  becoming  something  else, 
— ceaselessly,  day  and  night,  constantly  going  through 
the  process  of  becoming  and  of  ceasing  to  be." 

A  dialogue  of  a  later  time,  very  remarkable  in  a 
historical  regard,  reproducing  throughout  the  early 
Buddhistic  views,  treats  of  these  thoughts  in  greater 
detail.  It  is  the  conversation  of  a  holy  man  with  King 
Milinda  (the  Greek  Prince  Menander,  well-known  from 
coins),  who,  it  seems  likely,  ruled  over  the  Northwest 
of  India  about  loo  B.  C.  Strongly  reminding  one  of 
Heraclitus,  it  compares  life,  personality,  to  a  flame. 
"When,  O  great  King,  a  man  lights  a  candle,  will  not 
the  candle  burn  through  the  night?" — "Yes,  sire!  it 
will  burn  through  the  night." — "How,  then?  O  great 
King  !  Is  the  flame  during  the  first  watch  of  the  night 
the  same  that  it  is  in  the  second  watch ?  " — "No,  sire! 
.  .  .  but  the  light  burned  the  whole  night,  adhering  to 
the  same  matter." — "  So,  also,  O  great  King,  the  chain 
of  the  elements  of  things  is  joined  together.  One  ele- 
ment is  always  coming  into  being,  another  is  always 
ceasing  and  passing  away.  Without  beginning,  with- 
out end,  the  chain  continues  to  be  joined  together." 

The  identity  of  the  Greek  and  Indian  ideas  con- 
cerning the  nature  and  destinies  of  the  human  soul  ex- 
tends still  further.  What  are  the  effects  upon  those 
ideas  of  this  all-dominant,  pain-bringing  law  which 
subjects  everything  to  the  fate  of  coming  into  being 
only  to  pass  away  again  ?  Both  the  Greek  thinkers 
and  the  Buddhists  alike  answer  this  question  by  postu- 


94  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

lating  the  doctrine  of  the  migration  of  the  soul.  Death 
is  followed  by  a  new  birth — not  necessarily  in  human 
form,  both  the  divine  and  the  animal  are  deemed  pos- 
sible; this  re-birth  is  followed  again  by  death,  and  this 
by  re-birth :  so  that  the  one  life  is  merely  an  infinites- 
imal link  in  a  vast  chain  of  lives,  to  be  bound  up  in 
which  is  a  great  misfortune. 

The  Orpheans  symbolise  the  migration  of  the  soul 
by  means  of  a  circle  or  wheel.  They  speak  of  the 
wheel  of  fate  and  of  birth;  the  final  end  of  existence 
seems  to  them  to  be 

"  To  release  one's  self  from  the  circle  and  breathe  anew,  freed  from  dis- 
tress." 

In  the  inscription  of  a  small  gold  plate  taken  from 
a  tomb  near  the  ancient  Sybaris,  the  soul  of  the  buried 
person,  an  Orphean,  for  whom  the  claim  of  final  re- 
lease from  the  migration  of  the  soul  is  made,  exclaims : 

"At  last  I  have  flown  from  the  circle  of  ill,  the  toil-laden  ring." 

Imagine  the  rhythm  of  these  hexameters  turned 
into  the  irregular  movement  of  the  Indian  Sloka-rs\tXx&, 
and  one  might  imagine  himself  in  the  very  midst  of 
the  Buddhistic  poetry.     A  Buddhist  proverb  says : 

"  Long  to  the  watcher  is  the  night, 
To  the  weary  wand'rer  long  the  road, 
To  him,  who  will  not  see  truth's  light. 
Long  is  the  torment  of  his  chain  of  births," 

And  another  expression,  which  is  put  into  the 
mouth  of  Buddha,  at  the  point  when — his  trials  and 
struggles  over — he  has  achieved  the  knowledge  of  sal- 
vation. He  is  triumphing  in  the  fact  that  he  has  pen- 
etrated the  designs  of  the  wicked  foe,  those  evil  powers 
ruling  terrestrial  things,  who  unremittingly  are  ever  re- 


BUDDHISM.  95 

constructing  the  corporeal  house,  the  body,  and  whom 
he  has  succeeded  in  putting  away  from  himself : 

"  In  vain  the  endless  road 
Of  rebirth  I  have  wandered, 
In  vain  have  sought  life's  builder, 
An  ill  is  this  fate  of  birth. 

House-builder  I  found  you  are! 
You'll  build  no  more  the  house. 
Your  timbers  are  all  broken, 
Destroyed  the  house's  spires. 
The  heart — escaped  from  earth — 
Has  compassed  the  aim  of  its  search." 

And  in  the  same  way  that  the  Orpheans  symbolise 
the  continuous  existence  of  the  migrating  soul  by 
means  of  a  circle  or  wheel,  so  too  the  Buddhists  speak 
of  the  "wheel  of  lives."  Buddhistic  pictures  usually 
portray  this  wheel  of  existence  in  such  manner  that  a 
stage  of  existence  is  symbolically  shown  between  every 
pair  of  spokes,  as  the  human  kingdom,  the  animal 
kingdom,  heaven,  hell ;  beside  the  wheel  is  the  form 
of  Buddha,  who,  as  one  redeemed,  stands  without  the 
revolution  of  existences. 

In  the  dialogue  above  cited.  King  Milinda  asks  the 
holy  man  for  a  parable  which  shall  give  a  notion  of 
the  interminable,  beginningless  migration  of  the  soul. 
Thereupon  the  holy  man  draws  a  circle  on  the  ground 
and  asks  :  "  Has  this  circle  any  end,  great  King  ?  " — 
"  It  has  not,  sire!" — That  is  the  same  as  the  circle 
made  by  the  course  of  births,"  the  holy  man  teaches 
him.  "Is  there  then  any  end  to  its  succession ? " — 
"There  is  not,  sire  !" 

And  as  the  Orphean  doctrine  had  it  that  he  who 
was  redeemed  "  had  flown  from  the  circle,"  so  an  early 
Buddhistic  proverb  says  : 


96  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

"The  swan  soars  through  the  sun's  ethereal  pathways; 
The  sorcerer  flies  through  all  the  realms  of  space: 
So,  sages,  rich  in  wisdom,  flee  this  world, 
The  prince  of  death  and  all  his  powers  o'erwhelming." 

One  brief  glance  more  at  a  few  of  the  particular 
traits  of  the  doctrine  of  the  migration  of  the  soul, 
common  to  both  India  and  Greece.  It  will  be  plainly 
seen  that  the  fundamental  similitude  of  ideas  has  had 
the  effect  of  making  the  aspect  of  even  the  minuter 
details  in  the  two  religions  similar. 

One  characteristic,  very  prominent  among  both 
peoples,  is  the  very  natural  connexion  of  the  doctrine 
of  the  soul's  migration  with  the  idea  of  moral  retribu- 
tion. The  good  and  the  evil  which  man  has  wrought 
in  this  life  will  in  turn  be  done  to  him  in  another  life, 
meted  out  to  him  in  the  blessedness  of  heavenly,  or  in 
the  pain  of  infernal,  worlds. 

Naturally,  at  this  point,  the  popular  imagination — 
widely  removed  from  the  colorless  abstractions  of  re- 
flective thought — begins  to  play  a  part.  Poetry  drew 
all  kinds  of  pictures  of  the  horrors  of  the  infernal 
world.  There  was  a  "voyage  to  the  lower  world"  in 
poetry  among  the  Orpheans,  and  another  of  the  same 
name  among  the  Pythagoreans  ;  the  Buddhistic  litera- 
ture is  fairly  overrun  with  innumerable,  moral-pointing 
descriptions  of  the  descents  of  holy  men  into  the  in- 
fernal regions  and  of  the  horrors  there  observed  by 
them.* 

Opposed  to  these  terrors  are  the  heavenly  ecstasies. 
And  here  a  characteristic  appears  which  is  emphasised 
strongly  by  the  Buddhists,  but  visible  only  sporad- 
ically in  Greece,   although  entirely  the  same  there. 

*  We  may  refer  here  to  the  fine  description  which  L.  Scherman  {Materials 
for  a  History  of  the  Indian  Literature  of  Visions,  1892)  has  given  of  these  phan- 
tasins. 


BUDDHISM.  97 

Empedocles  denies  immortality  to  the  gods  ;  their 
longevity  is  great,  but  they  are  not  eternal.  The  di- 
vinities of  the  Veda  have  in  the  same  way  ceased  to 
be  immortal  to  the  Buddhists.  Possessed  of  a  length 
of  life  reaching  beyond  the  grasp  of  all  human  stand- 
ards of  measurement,  they  are,  nevertheless,  along 
with  others,  knit  into  the  chain  of  the  migration  of 
souls  ;  and  the  human  being  who  has  lived  a  blame- 
less life,  dare  hope  to  be  born  again  as  a  god.  No 
more  lively  illustration  can  be  found  in  all  the  history 
of  religion  than  this  fate  of  the  ancient  gods,  how  an 
idea — having  lost  its  original  import,  its  own  proper 
life — yet  maintains  its  existence  into  a  later  age  and 
is  then  by  the  latter  animated  with  a  new  import,  cor- 
responding to  the  altered  views  of  things. 

As  still  another  common  Indo-Grecian  character- 
istic of  the  doctrine  of  the  migration  of  the  soul  may 
be  mentioned,  that,  among  both  peoples,  there  were 
certain  especially  inspired  men,  who  could,  so  it  was 
held  of  them,  recall  the  various  earlier  embodiments 
which  they  themselves  and  others  had  passed  through. 
Pythagoras,  of  whom  it  was  sung  that 

"  When  he  with  might  compelled  to  the  fullest  the  powers  of  mind. 
Easily  could  he  th'adventures  o'erscan  of  every  existence, 
Through  ten,  yea,  through  the  vista  of  twenty  past,  long  human  life-spans," 

is  said  to  have  related  experiences  and  adventures 
from  his  earlier  lives.     Empedocles  said  : 

"  Thus  have  I  been  in  former  existence  a  youth,  and  a  maiden. 
So,  too,  a  shrub,  and  an  eagle,  a  poor  mute  fish  in  the  ocean." 

Exactly  so,  only  exaggerating  the  marvellous  into 
the  boundlessly  wonderful,  the  Buddhistic  religion  tells 
how  in  that  holy  night  in  which  he  first  beholds  the 
true  knowledge  of  salvation,  as  in  a  vision,  the  whole 


98  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

picture  of  his  previous  forms  of  existence,  through 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  births,  passes  in  review  be- 
fore the  soul  of  Buddha.  Tales,  recording  adventures 
of  the  most  variegated  colors  from  these  past  exist- 
ences of  Buddha  himself,  of  his  disciples  and  enemies, 
accompanied  with  lessons  and  applications  of  every 
sort,  are  among  the  most  cherished  elements  of  popu- 
lar Buddhistic  literature.  Hundreds  of  re-births  are 
recounted  of  Buddha,  now  as  a  king,  again  as  a  devout 
hermit,  or  as  a  courtier,  or  as  a  god,  or  as  a  lion,  an 
ape,  a  fish.  And  it  is  well  known  how  inestimable  is 
the  value  of  these  stories  and  fables  to  the  folk-lore 
studies  of  our  own  time — seeing  that  the  motive  of 
them  frequently  reappears,  scattered  over  the  whole 
earth. 

III. 

Opposed  to  the  realm  of  the  migration  of  the  soul 
with  all  its  sufferings,  there  is,  for  Greek  and  Indian 
thinkers  alike,  a  world  of  freedom,  of  the  complete 
cessation  of  all  suffering.  Whilst  the  youthful  human 
mind  of  the  early  ages  perceived  in  power  and  victory, 
in  wealth  and  long  life,  the  chief  joys  of  life,  the  su- 
preme end  of  life  is  now  salvation  from  the  misery  of 
becoming  and  passing  away,  rest  in  the  calm  glory  of 
eternity. 

Among  the  Greeks,  as  we  have  seen,  the  Orpheans 
speak  of  "releasing  one's  self  from  the  circle,"  and  of 
"taking  flight  from  the  circle."  Plato  pictures  the 
soul  as  being  rescued  from  its  wanderings  and  enter- 
ing into  "the  community  of  the  divine,  the  pure,  the 
true  to  itself."  At  one  time,  it  is  the  negative  form 
which  this  ideal  assumes  :  the  release  from  the  suffer- 
ing of  existence.     At  another,  it  is  the  positive  form  : 


BUDDHISM.  99 

perfect,  unchanging  blessedness.  A  certain  reserve 
was  for  the  most  part  observed  toward  the  temptation 
to  make  the  description  of  this  condition  of  perfection 
too  concrete  and  to  paint  it  in  high  colors :  these  most 
beautiful  homes  of  the  soul  are  not  easily  described, 
says  Plato. 

Now  this  all  very  closely  touches  upon  Buddhistic 
ideas.  Buddha  says  to  his  followers:  "As  the  great 
ocean,  my  disciples,  is  permeated  with  a  single  flavor, 
the  flavor  of  the  salt ;  so,  too,  disciples,  is  this  doc- 
trine and  this  law  permeated  with  a  single  flavor,  the 
flavor  of  salvation." 

"There  is,  my  disciples,  a  place  where  there  is 
neither  earth  nor  water,  neither  light  nor  air,  neither 
this  world  nor  that  world,  neither  sun  nor  moon.  I 
call  that,  disciples,  neither  coming  nor  going  nor  rest- 
ing, neither  death  nor  birth.  It  is  without  substruc- 
ture, without  progress,  without  stop.  It  is  the  end  of 
suffering." 

Sometimes  the  various  turns  taken  by  the  Bud- 
dhistic texts  in  which  this  final  aim.  Nirvana,  is  spoken 
of,  run  as  if  this  aim  were  the  termination  of  all  being, 
or  absolute  nothing  ;  then  again  they  seem  to  point  to 
a  state  of  highest  perfection,  surpassing  all  compre- 
hension and  baffling  all  description.  Taken  as  a  whole, 
the  coloring  of  these  thoughts  is  perceptibly  a  more 
negative  one  than  in  Greece ;  and  the  solution  of  all 
too  far-reaching  questions  is  declined  with  greater 
firmness  and  readiness.  "  He  who  has  gained  salva- 
tion," thus  runs  a  Buddhistic  quotation,  "surpasses 
the  point  where  his  being  can  be  compassed  by  the 
numbers  of  the  corporeal  world.  He  is  deep,  immeas- 
urable, unfathomable,  like  the  ocean."  And  at  an- 
other time,  Buddha  says  to  a  disciple,  who  will  not 


lOO  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

suiKer  a  quietus  to  be  imposed  upon  his  questions  about 
the  existence  of  him  who  has  won  salvation  :  "What 
is  not  revealed  by  me,  suffer  it  to  remain  unrevealed." 

As  to  the  ideas  concerning  the  way  by  which  the 
final  highest  aim  was  to  be  attained — in  Greece  they 
rapidly  developed  in  matter  and  profundity.  Early 
thought  still  remained  essentially  under  the  influence 
of  religious  creations  which  carry  the  style  of  remotest 
antiquity.  We  know  what  is  the  customary  practice 
in  the  cult  of  uncivilised  peoples,  for  one  who  seeks 
to  acquire  supernatural  power  or  to  ward  off  evil  spirits 
or  death-bringing  things  of  witchcraft.  He  fasts  ;  he 
withdraws  into  solitude  ;  he  avoids  everything  that  has 
any  relation  with  death  or  similar  perils,  as  food  which 
for  some  reason  or  other  is  considered  to  be  connected 
with  the  kingdom  of  death ;  by  various  means  he  ex- 
cites within  himself  ecstatic  conditions.  This  technique 
of  the  primitive  sorcerer's  art,  applied  to  new  pur- 
poses, maintained  itself  in  Greece  as  elsewhere  with 
indomitable  pertinacity. 

It  has  been  justly  observed,  that  a  figure  like  that 
of  Epimenides — an  adept  master  of  mystical  wisdom, 
flourishing  about  600  B.  C,  and  celebrated  throughout 
all  Greece, — bears  a  number  of  traits  which  character- 
ise perfectly  the  type  of  the  savage  medicine-man : 
fasts  and  solitude,  mystic  intercourse  with  the  spirits, 
long  ecstacies,  in  which  he  gains  his  "enthusiastic 
wisdom."  The  interdiction  of  food  and — if  this  ethno- 
logical expression  be  permissible — the  observance  of 
taboos  of  various  kinds,  among  which  is  very  promi- 
nent the  aversion  to  all  things  which  in  any  way  re- 
mind one  of  the  domain  of  death, — these  are  a  special 
vehicle  for  the  spiritual  endeavors  both  of  the  Orpheans 
and  of  the  Pythagoreans. 


BUDDHISM.  loi 

But  a  new  tendency  is  soon  introduced  and  gains 
more  and  more  in  strength.  True  continence  and 
purity,  so  Plato  teaches,  lie  in  the  purification  of  the 
soul  from  all  sensual  things,  liberation  from  the  pas- 
sions and  desires  which  "transfix  the  soul  to  the  body 
as  with  a  nail"  and  which  compel  the  soul  to  endure 
being  reborn  in  ever  new  forms  of  embodiment.  The 
redeemer  from  these  bonds  is  philosophy,  which  alone 
really  prepares  one  for  death.  Philosophy  guides  us 
from  the  world  of  constant  becoming  into  that  of  ac- 
tual being,  into  the  realm  of  eternal  ideas.  The  blessed 
moment  of  a  vision  dawns  :  the  curtain  before  the 
thinker's  eyes  sunders,  and  truth  herself  shines  upon 
him,  in  the  glory  of  which  immersing  itself,  the  soul 
is  released  from  the  transitory  world.  In  the  joy,  the 
bliss  of  this  contemplation,  the  philosopher,  even  here 
below,  deems  himself  in  the  islands  of  the  blessed. 
Death,  however,  forever  releases  the  soul  of  him,  who 
"has  purified  himself  through  philosophy,  from  cor- 
poreality'*: his  soul  enters  into  "  that  akin  to  his  soul, 
the  invisible,  the  divine,  the  immortal,  the  truly  wise. " 

In  this  last  thought,  the  chain  of  ideas,  which  we 
are  now  considering,  found  its  culmination.  And  up 
to  this  very  point,  the  Indian  ideas  follow  the  Greek 
ideas  in  undeviatingly  parallel  lines. 

In  India,  too,  in  Buddha's  age,  the  aims  of  the  new 
spiritual  yearning  were  striven  for  with  the  same  means 
from  the  old  cult  of  sorcery,  that  we  find  in  Greece — 
retirement  into  solitude,  exhaustion  by  severe  fastings, 
and  the  development  of  a  whole  category  of  ecstatic 
conditions.  For  its  part.  Buddhism  rejects  fasting  as 
well  as  every  kind  of  self-torture  ;  but  it  lays  great 
stress  upon  the  cultivation  of  those  ecstatic  medita- 
tions, in  the  exalted  calm  and  quiet  of  which,  afar 


loa  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

from  the  confusing  superabundance  of  form  of  the 
material  world,  it  was  thought,  a  presentiment  or  fore- 
taste might  be  enjoyed  of  the  final  termination  of  all 
transitoriness.  One  of  the  old  Buddhist  monkish 
poets  sings  : 

"When  the  thundercloud  its  drum  awakes, 
Fast  the  rain  sweeps  o'er  the  bird's  swift  pathSt 
And  in  quiet  mountain  cave  the  monk 
Fosters  revery :  no  joy  like  that ! 

"  When,  along  the  flowery  bank  of  streams, 
Which  the  forest's  motley  garland  crowns. 
He  fosters  revery,  wrapped  in  blissful  calm, 
No  joy  ever  can  he  find  like  that ! " 

But  that  which,  before  all  other  things,  gives  re- 
lease from  earthly  suffering  is  the  complete  subjection 
of  desire,  of  "that  thirst  which  but  leads  from  one  re- 
birth to  another  re-birth," — the  attainment  of  the  pure 
and  highest  knowledge. 

''Who  conquers  it — 'that  despicable  thirst,  which 
it  is  difficult  to  escape  in  this  world — from  him  all  suf- 
fering drops  like  drops  of  water  from  the  lotus  flower." 

But  this  thirst  which  accompanies  earthly  exist- 
ence may  be  subdued  through  knowledge, — that  knowl- 
edge which  discovers  the  misery  of  the  fate  of  be- 
coming, merely  to  pass  away  again,  and  reveals  the 
cessation  thereof  in  the  escape  from  this  world.  Since 
the  value  or  worthlessness  of  life  depends  upon  the 
fateful  play  of  great  cosmic  powers,  the  endeavor  of 
the  devout,  the  sage,  is  directed  no  longer  to  the  ob- 
ject of  securing  the  goods  of  this  world  through  the 
friendship  of  benevolent  gods,  but  to  the  aim  of  pen- 
etrating the  infinite  cosmic  process,  in  order  that, 
having  mastered  it,  he  may  prepare  for  himself  the 
future  place  where  it  is  good  to  be.     This  last  propo- 


BUDDHISM.  103 

sition  is  alike  characteristic  of  the  religion  of  India 
and  of  Greece. 

Like  the  ideas  of  Plato,  the  doctrine  of  the  Bud- 
dhists is  that  the  seeker  gains  possession  of  the  knowl- 
edge of  salvation, — after  a  ceaseless  struggle  and  en- 
deavor continuing  through  a  period  of  innumerable 
re-births, — in  the  sudden  inspiration  of  one  incompar- 
able instant  of  time.  He  to  whom  this  instant  has 
come  has  ''obtained  salvation  and  beheld  it  face  to 
face."  The  Buddhist  enlightened  one,  like  the  phi- 
losopher of  Plato,  continues  to  live  on  earth  as  a  com- 
pleted being  who,  in  his  most  fundamental  nature,  is 
now  no  longer  an  earthly  citizen.  "The  monk  who 
has  put  away  from  him  lust  and  desire,  and  is  rich  in 
wisdom,  he  has  even  here  on  earth  obtained  salvation 
from  death,  rest,  Nirvana,  the  eternal  home."  And 
when  the  end  of  earthly  existence  has  come,  he  disap- 
pears into  those  mysterious  depths,  concerning  which 
Buddha  forbade  his  disciples  to  inquire  whether  their 
meaning  is  ideal  being  or  absolute  nothing. 

* 

The  naturalist,  studying  a  cellular  structure,  will 
obtain  very  different  views  of  the  same  object,  accord- 
ing to  the  direction  in  which  he  makes  his  sections. 
The  direction  in  which  we  have  contemplated  Bud- 
dhism made  it  possible  for  us  to  notice  the  very  clos- 
est relationship  between  its  fundamental  principles 
and  the  doctrines  of  the  Orpheans,  the  Pythagoreans, 
and  Plato.  But  in  conclusion,  we  must  not  omit 
briefly  to  point  out  that  other  lines  of  consideration 
would  have  produced  other  views  and  other  compari- 
sons of  a  very  different  nature. 

If  we  scan  the  personality  of  the  great  Indian  pro- 
mulgator of  these  ideas,  we  find  at  once  that  Buddha 


I04  ANCIENT  INDIA. 

is  in  all  the  phenomena  of  his  life,  in  the  manner  of 
his  teachings  and  labors,  as  widely  different  from  the 
Greek  thinkers  as  the  Oriental  character  is  from  the 
Hellenic.  A  nimbus  of  miracles  surrounding  and 
glorifying  his  life,  a  lofty  dignity  which  overtops  all 
the  universe,  caps  his  image  in  a  way  impossible  to 
imagine  in  connexion  with  the  earthly  and  human  fig- 
ures of  Pythagoras  and  Plato.  It  is  no  longer  the 
regions  of  Greek  philosophy,  but  rather  the  regions 
of  the  Gospels,  into  which  the  Buddhistic  tradition 
now  seems  to  conduct  us.  In  fact,  some  have  gone 
so  far — though  in  my  opinion  without  sufficient  reason 
— as  to  draw  from  the  striking  resemblances  of  these 
two  fields  the  conclusion  that  direct  transfers  have 
been  made  from  India  to  the  West.  As  it  was  for- 
merly supposed  that  Pythagoras  had  drawn  his  doc- 
trines from  Indian  sources  closely  related  to  Bud- 
dhism, so,  too,  the  assumption  has  found  believers — 
corresponding  to  the  various  views  taken  of  Buddhism 
— that  Buddhistic  prototypes  underlie  extensive  por- 
tions of  the  Gospels,  and  that  either  at  Alexandria  or 
at  Antioch  the  intercourse  of  Christian  writers  with 
Buddhistic  envoys  led  to  the  introduction  of  a  large 
number  of  stories,  proverbs  and  parables  from  Indian 
literature  into  that  of  the  New  Testament. 

It  would  be  possible  to  carry  this  identification 
still  further.  If  along  with  the  person  of  Buddha  and 
with  his  doctrine  we  glance  at  the  third  member 
of  the  ancient  Buddhistic  trinity — the  ecclesiastical 
brotherhood  or  church — we  shall  be  reminded,  with 
sufficient  vividness,  by  the  immemorially  ancient  rules 
of  the  Buddhistic  order  of  mendicant  monks, — with 
its  deep-rooted  aversion  to  the  world,  the  austerity  of 
its  precepts  as  to  poverty  and  chastity,  with  its  long 


BUDDHISM.  105 

list  of  instructions  concerning  the  observance  of  dignity 
and  reserve,  which  are  manifested  after  a  set  fashion 
in  mien  and  glance,  in  the  manner  of  eating  and  drink- 
ing, in  short,  in  every  gesture, — of  Christian  monasti- 
cism,  whether  viewed  as  a  whole  or  in  its  minutest 
details. 

I  think  that  we  may  and  must  be  satisfied  with  the 
similarity  of  historical  causes  at  work  in  the  two  sep- 
arate quarters  of  the  world  as  the  explanation  for  all 
these  resemblances, — a  similarity  which  in  my  judg- 
ment amply  accounts  for  our  meeting  among  civilisa- 
tions nearer  to  us  in  time  and  place  with  formations, 
isolated  and  scattered,  yet  closely  resembling  those 
which  at  the  height  of  Indian  history,  pulsating  with 
Indian  life-blood,  were  united,  in  Buddhism,  into  so 
compact  and  remarkable  a  whole. 


INDEX. 


Agni,  19,  44,  77. 

Ahana,  48. 

Alexander  of  Epirus,  40. 

Alexander  the  Great,  39. 

Amelung,  12  footnote. 

Animals,  deified  in  early  religions, 

62  et  seq. 
Animism,  60  et  seq. 
Anthropomorphism,  63  et  seq. 
Antiochns,  40. 
Arya,  18. 
Asceticism,  go. 
Asiatic  Society,  i  et  seq.,  5. 
Asoka,  39,  40. 
Asvin,  55,  67. 
Athene,  48. 
Aurora,  20  footnote. 

Babylon,  inflnence  of,  on  the  religion 
of  India,  72. 

Benfey,  7  footnote,  15. 

Bimbisara,  39. 

Birth  and  rebirth,  93. 

Blessedness,  state  of,  991 

BOhtlingk,  28. 

Books,  committed  to  memory  in  an- 
cient India,  22  et  seq. 

Bopp,  10,  13,  27. 

Brahma,  18. 

Brahmans,  4-6. 

Buddha,  7,  90,  92-94,  98,  99,  103,  104; 
date  o(  his  advent,  38  et  seq.,  79-80; 
religion  of,  43. 

Buddhism,  literature  and  customs 
of,  12,  22;  Greek  religious  thought 
compared  with,  78  et  seq.,  92  et  seq., 
date  of  its  rise,  79-80;  resemblances 
between  Christianity  and,  104. 


Burgman,  12  footnote. 
Burnouf,  12,  28. 

Candle,  simile  of,  93. 

Caste,  priestly,  74. 

Castes  in  early  India,  18-19. 

Caunaka,  25-26. 

Causes,  historical,  similarity  of,  suf- 
ficient to  account  for  the  resem- 
blances of  dififerent  religions,  105. 

Chronology  of  early  India,  37  et  seq. 

Coincidences  in  the  religious  thought 
of  various  nations,  79. 

Colebrooke,  8. 

Comparative,  grammar,  10,  27 ;  myth- 
ology, 45,  51 ;  philology,  45. 

Daughter,  46. 

Dawn,  19,  so. 

Deborah,  song  of,  69  footnote. 

Demons,  good  and  bad,  65. 

Devas,  64. 

Devotees,  societies  of,  89. 

Dionysus,  go. 

Dioskuroi,  55,  67. 

Dushjanta,  6. 

East  India  Company,  policy  of,  4. 

Ecstasy,  100,  loi. 

Edda,  46,  55. 

Ego,  84. 

Egypt,  62. 

Elements,  natural,  personification  of 

in  early  religions,  62  et  seq. 
Empedocles,  97. 
English  in  India,  2,  4  et  seq. 
Ealightenment,  Buddhistic,  103. 
Epic,  the  Indian,  31, 


io8 


ANCIENT  INDIA. 


Epimenides,  loo. 

Erinys,  47,  49. 

Ethical  stage  of  the  evolution  of  re- 
ligion, 70  et  seq. 

Ethnology,  its  influence  on  Vedic  re- 
search, 51,  56  et  seq. 

Evolution  of  divinities,  66. 

Fasting,  100,  loz. 
Fetishes,  65. 
Fever  {tapas),  76. 
Futurity,  84-85. 

Ganges,  18. 

Germany,  her  share  in  Sanskrit  re- 
search, I,  9,  26. 

Gospels,  compared  with  Buddhism, 
104. 

Grammar,  Sanskrit,  its  subtlety  and 
complexity,  5-6,  24-26. 

Grammatical  systems,  their  evolu- 
tion, 54. 

Greece,  Buddhistic  parallels  in,  87 
et  seq.,  93  et  seq. 

Greek  mystics,  90  et  seq. 

Greek  mythology,  55. 

Greeks,  contact  of  with  the  Hindus, 
39- 

Grimm  Brothers,  28,  32. 

Hastings,  Warren,  4. 

Haupt,  27. 

Hearing,  rich  in,  synonym  of  "well 

read,"  23. 
Heaven,  85-86,  96. 
Helen  of  Troy,  48-52. 
Hell,  85. 

Heraclitus,  91,  92,  93. 
Hermann,  Gottfried,  27. 
Hermes,  47,  footnote,  55. 
History  of  early  India,  18-19. 
Homer,  10,  14,  58,  82. 
Hymns  of  the  Rig- Veda,  18-26. 

Ideas,  Plato's,  88,  92. 

Identity  of  historical  causes,  suffi- 
cient to  account  for  the  resem- 
blances of  different  religions,  105. 

India,  history  of  early,  35  et  seq. 

India  Office  Library,  8. 

Indian  civilisation,  rise  of,  80. 


Indian  philosophy,  rise  of,  80. 
Indo-Germanic  languages,  lo. 
Indra,  19,  33,  44,  55,  66,  69  footnote; 

70. 17- 
Indus,  18. 

Intellect  in  religion,  83. 
Iranian  divinity,  72,  73. 
Italic  language,  10. 

Jehovah,  69  footnote. 
Jones,  Sir  William,  a-7. 

Kalidasa,  6,  14. 

Knowledge,  of  salvation,  103. 

Kuhn,  Adalbert,  15,  49. 

Lachman,  Karl,  27. 

Lang,  56. 

Lassen,  Christian,  13. 

Laws  of  India,  4  etseq. 

Lessing,  27. 

Lexicography  of  the  Veda,  39. 

Lycurgus,  6. 

Mahabharata,  i2,  13. 

Mannhardt,  W.,  56. 

Manu,  laws  of,  6,  13,  44,  46. 

Manuscripts  of  the  Veda,  14. 

Medicine-man,  100. 

Memorising  of  books,  23. 

Meander,  93. 

Mexico,  62. 

Migration  of  the  soul,  84,  94,  96-98, 
99-103  et  seq. 

Migrations  of  the  early  Indians,  18- 
19. 

Milinda,  King,  93,  95. 

Monasticism,  Christian  and  Bud- 
dhistic, 104-105. 

Monotheism,  68  et  seq. 

Mother-tongue,  11. 

Miiller,  Max,  5  footnote,  15,  28,  46,  50. 

Mystical  wisdom,  100. 

Mystics,  Greek,  90  et  seq. 

Mythological  history,  54. 

Mythology,  and  religion  of  early  In- 
dia, 33,  44 ;  Greek  and  Latin,  46. 

Myths,  interpreted  as  meteorological 
phenomena,  50  et  seq.;  of  savage 
races,  56  et  set}. 


INDEX. 


109 


Natural  powers  deified,  6&-67. 
Nether  world,  85. 

Nirvana,  abstractly  described,  85-86; 
92,  99,  103. 

Odyssey,  The,  85. 

Olympian  gods,  50. 

Orniuzd,  72. 

Orpheans,  94-96. 

Orpheus,  mysteries  of,  87-89,  98. 

Pali,  12. 

Parallelism  of  Buddhistic  and  Greek 
religious  thought,  78  et  seq.,  103. 

Parjanya,  21. 

Paulinus  i  St.  Bartholomaeo,  5  foot- 
note. 

Perkunas,  21  footnote. 

Philology,  27. 

Pindar,  89. 

Plato,  ethics,  philosophy,  and  poetry 
of,  91,  92,  98,  loi,  103,  104. 

Poetry  of  early  India,  19. 

Polytheism,  68-69. 

Pons,  Father,  7  footnote. 

Pramantha,  49,  52,  53. 

Prayer,  64  et  seq. 

Prehistoric  cults,  57  et  seq. 

Priests,  early  Indian,  18-19. 

Prinseps,  12. 

Prometheus,  49,  52,  53. 

Punishment,  85. 

Purification    of    the    soul,    Plato's, 

lOI. 

Pushan,  55. 
Pythagoreans,  87-89,  96,  98. 

Release  from  suffering,  94,  98  et  seq. 

Religion,  primitive,  58  et  seq.,  60  et 
seq.;  intellect  in,  83. 

Religions  of  savage  races,  56  et  seq. 

Religious,  ceremonies,  75 ;  heroes, 
81,  82;  thought,  development  of, 
43;  thought,  resemblances  of  in 
various  nations,  79 ;  rewards,  85. 

Resignation,  90. 

Retribution,  moral,  96. 

Rig-Veda,  18,  28,  31  et  seq.,  44. 

Rohde,  E.,  87  footnote. 

Roman  and  Greek  history  compared 
with  early  Indian,  36. 


Roth,  15,  28. 
ROckert,  F.,  9. 

Sacrifices,  cult  of,  64  et  seq.;  early 
Indian,  19-20;  Vedic,  73-76. 

Sage,  religious,  102. 

Sakuntala,  6. 

Salvation,  85-86,  99. 

Sanskrit,  study  of,  its  origin,  i  et 
seq. ;  supposed  identity  of,  with 
other  languages,  7 ;  its  primitive- 
ness,  11;  St.  Petersburg  Diction- 
ary of,  28;  roots  of,  46,  52. 

Sarama,  47-48,  52. 

Saramejas,  48. 

Saranjus,  47. 

Sayana,  28. 

Schermann,  L.,  96  footnote. 

Schlegel,  9. 

Schmidt,  John,  12  footnote. 

Self,  85. 

Seven,  47  footnote. 

Soma,  33,  75. 

Sorcery,  63  et  seq.,  75-76,  100. 

Soul,  the  human,  83-85. 

Spirits,  60  et  seq. 

Stone  age  of  religion,  65. 

Suffering,  go,  92. 

Suffering,  cessation  of,  99. 

Sun-myth,  48,  56. 

Survivals,  religious,  57  et  seq. 

Sybaris,  94. 

Taboos,  100. 

Tacitus,  18,  31. 

Tapas,  76. 

Teutonic  mythology,  55. 

Texts  of  the  Veda,  17. 

Theogony  of  early  India,  44,  50. 

Thirst  for  existence,  93. 

Thor.  55. 

Time-standards  of  the  Veda,  38. 

Trinity,  Buddhistic,  95. 

Troubadours,  the,  14. 

Troy,  siege  of,  48. 

Tschandragux'ta,  39. 

Tylor,  56. 

Ushas,  20,  45. 

Varuna,  44,  67,  71,  72,  77. 
Vftyu,  33- 


no 


ANCIENT  INDIA. 


Veda,  the  study  of,  2;  history  of  its 
acquisition,  14  et  seq.;  when  com- 
posed, 17 ;  its  form  and  import,  17- 
24;  its  exegesis,  28  et  seq.;  litera- 
ture and  religion  of,  43  ;  Old  Testa- 
ment compared  with,  6g  footnote. 

Vedic  divinities,  character  of,  70  et 
seq.,  77  ;  not  primordial,  59,  97. 

Vowels,  their  transformations  in  the 
Indo-Germanic  languages,  11  foot- 
note. 

Vritra,  33. 


Weber,  15,  29. 

Wheel,  Orphean  and  Buddhistic,  94, 

95- 
Wilson's  Sanskrit  Dictionary,  30. 
Woden,  33  footnote. 
Writing,  Vedas  not  transmitted   in. 

22-26. 


Zimmer,  31  footnote. 
Zoroaster,  15. 


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